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Robert Fisk

  • ’Can’t Blair see that this country is about to explode? Can’t Bush?’
    2 August 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
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    By Robert Fisk
    The war is a fraud. I’m not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida which didn’t exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I’m talking about the new lies.
    For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist. Much of Iraq has fallen outside the control of America’s puppet government in Baghdad but we are (…)

  • Protection, not oppression: How the new mobile police patrols have discovered job satisfaction
    1 August 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 30 July 2004
    Their Kalashnikov automatic rifles regularly jam after firing two bullets, their flak jackets don’t protect them, their promised £45 pay increase never arrived, their boss wants to take the air-conditioners from their vehicles and the hospitals can’t cope with their wounded.
    Apart from that, the men of the new Iraqi police mobile patrols in Baghdad - the front-line victims of the Iraq war - are fighting fit. More than that. They’ve found that (…)

  • Unreported war: US document reveals scale of conflict
    31 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Robert Fisk
    Iraq, we are told by Mr Blair, is safer. It is not. US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported. This account of the insurgency across Iraq over three days last week provides astonishing proof that Iraq under its new, American-appointed Prime Minister, has grown more dangerous and violent.
    But even this is only a partial record of events. US casualties and dozens of Iraqi civilian deaths (…)

  • Baghdad is a city that reeks with the stench of the dead
    29 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
    The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered.
    "He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could (…)

  • Terror by video: How Iraq’s kidnappers drew their inspiration from horrors of Chechnya
    27 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Robert Fisk
    The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il shrieks "Don’t kill me" over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of Iraq’s kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations - usually by a well-known Saudi imam are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the shirt of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. (…)

  • The Crisis of Information in Baghdad, four Missiles, 14 Deaths
    20 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Robert Fisk
    This is how they like it. An American helicopter fires four missiles at a house in Fallujah. Fourteen people are killed, including women and children. Or so say the hospital authorities.
    But no Western journalist dares to go to Fallujah. Video footage taken by local civilians shows only a hole in the ground, body parts under a grey blanket and an unnamed man shouting that young children were killed.
    The US authorities say they know nothing about the air strike; indeed, (…)

  • The Iraq War is All Right Then
    19 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Robert Fisk
    Lord Butler told us Wednesday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So that’s all right then.
    At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad on the same morning, there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons? "We are not killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq." So that’s all right then. (…)

  • Iraqi academics targeted in murder spree
    16 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
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    Robert Fisk
    The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today’s Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books.
    Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago - virtually unreported, of course - the female dean of the college (…)

  • The day Jawad saw the birds fall from the sky and the villagers lying dead at his feet
    12 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Robert Fisk
    AWAD’S job yesterday was to find The Independent a new fir tree - or at least some foliage which would colour the sun-bleached balcony of the paper’s office in Baghdad. The fine little Christmas fir which graced the apartment had, despite promises of constant watering by colleagues, turned into a black, carbonised tree of tiny dark prickles. So it was that I set forth for the market garden behind Palestine Street, a place that reeks of hot flowers and undergrowth and pot (…)

  • So this is what they call the new, ’free’ Iraq
    7 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By Robert Fisk
    He drafted a new piece of legislation forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than 60 attacks on US forces over the weekend. And all the while, Mr Bremer was worrying about the standards of Iraqi driving.
    It (…)