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Robert Fisk

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is dead. Now we'll never know the truth about Lockerbie

So the old scoundrel has died. Midday Tripoli time, at his home, peacefully, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, after a long struggle with cancer, "bravely borne" no doubt.

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Inside Robert Fisk

Cloud of Syria's war hangs over Lebanese cleric's death

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

There was gunfire at Sheikh Ahmed Abdul-Wahid's funeral in northern Lebanon yesterday, a promise from the Lebanese army that they will investigate his killing – by a soldier – on Sunday, and a heap of appeals for calm from both the military and the government.
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The Belfast hotel where you check in but never leave

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Wars never end. Not if you're fighting in them, even reporting them.
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Must we stand idly by while leaders spout this codswallop?

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Even Churchill told the Empire that Britain would 'not stand by idly and see Poland trampled'. Funny how the news agenda gets tired. Like the quotes.
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Must we stand idly by while world leaders spout this codswallop?

Monday, 14 May 2012

Funny how the news agenda gets tired. Like the quotes. Only a couple of months ago, we were all bracing for Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear installations. And for serious pressure on Bashar al-Assad to end his "barbaric campaign".
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After the Arab spring was there an Islamic awakening?

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

More than a decade and a half ago, I travelled to Holland to meet - in the anonymity of a train station café at Leiden, at his request - one of the most brilliant Arab professors of Islamic thought, Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid.
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The Children of Fallujah - families fight back

Friday, 27 April 2012

"He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It's a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing."
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Children of Fallujah: Stillbirths, disabilities and deformities too distressing to describe

Thursday, 26 April 2012

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth.
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Bahrain Grand Prix: This is politics not sport. If drivers can't see that, they are the pits

Saturday, 21 April 2012

When the Foreign Office urges British motor racing fans to stay away from Bahrain, this ain't no sporting event, folks, it's a political one.
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History of war is laid out on the streets of Baghdad

Monday, 16 April 2012

Saad Tahr Hussein rushes me through the narrow alleyway towards Mutanabbi Street, where the concrete wall in front of the central bank hems in the pedestrians. About a thousand Iraqis briefly see — or don't notice — the sly shade of a Brit as he stumbles down the alley.
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Ali Shabaan: Shot in the heart - the journalist Assad made into a martyr

Wednesday, 11 April 2012

They buried Ali Shabaan as a martyr-reporter yesterday, another journalist of the Syrian war to die in action – but a Lebanese this time, unknown in the West but loved in his little south Lebanon village, not least by the girl to whom he was to have become officially engaged this Saturday.
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Watch carefully as we drag the UN into Afghanistan

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

So back to THAT BLOODY WAR. I mean not the Syrian one - where we're going to stay hands off - or the Libyan one (where we were hands on, but not touching the ground).
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Madness is not the reason for Afghan massacre

Monday, 19 March 2012

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course.

With that history, why did we think Syria would fall?

Tuesday, 6 March 2012

In my 1912 Baedeker guide to Syria, a page and a half is devoted to the city of Homs. In tiny print, it says that, "in the plain to the south-east, you come across the village of Baba Amr.
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The fearful realities keeping the Bashar Assad regime in power

Monday, 5 March 2012

Jailed in Geneva - the colonel who stood up against Mubarak, but refused to spy for the Swiss

Friday, 2 March 2012

He is 54 but looks 70 – "like an Indian yogi with a long white beard," as ex-Colonel Mohamed el-Ghanem's Swiss lawyer puts it.
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Syria's regime calls it 'cleaning', but the dirty truth is plain to see

Thursday, 1 March 2012

So it's the "cleaning" of Baba Amr now, is it? "Tingheef" in Arabic. Did that anonymous Syrian government official really use that word to the AP yesterday? It's a chilling expression, one that always precedes a lot of killing.
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Revolution brings Tunisia more fear than freedom

Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Want to remember what Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was like? Just walk down the Avenue Habib-Bourguiba – until a few weeks ago still cordoned off by armoured vehicles and barbed wire – and drop by your local bookshop for Z's wonderful Révolution! Des années mauves à la fuite de Carthage.
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Robert Fisk: I've lost a good, brave, honourable friend

Monday, 20 February 2012

Tewfik Mishlawi was the first Palestinian to report for The Times.
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Palestinians only Arabs on Mediterranean not to enjoy a Spring

Saturday, 28 January 2012

The Palestinians are not only, it seems, an "invented people" – courtesy of Newt Gingrich – but the only Arabs on the Mediterranean not to enjoy a Spring or an Awakening or even a Winter.
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It suits Israel that we never forget 'Nuclear Iran'

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah.
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