As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the …
A trap has been set for Israel
Israel’s forces are massed at the border awaiting orders to launch a “full offensive” against Gaza. For days, airstrikes and artillery have been bombarding the Gaza statelet where Hamas has its warfighting machinery honeycombed inside city blocks. “You will have …
Israel’s distraction is a warning to the West
How could Israel let this happen? As footage of Gazan motorbikes pelting through holes in Israel’s “smart” border fence started to circulate, of paragliders descending on a desert rave, of entire families being kidnapped or butchered in their homes, that …
Israel and the rise of a new world order
Within hours of Hamas’s attack on Saturday, the celebrations had started in Iran. The Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a new propaganda video, glorifying the so-called “Al Aqsa Storm” operation. In Tehran’s “Palestine Square”, regime flunkies …
How MBS wins friends and influences people
Prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, nobody cared much for Saudi Arabia: a largely nomadic, pre-industrial desert nation with a population smaller than London. But in the last 50 years, it has become a friend worth cultivating. So much …
The rise of pro-Western disinformation
When the US State Department launched its Iran Disinformation Project in the autumn of 2018, it was hailed as a new weapon in the war on hostile foreign propaganda. Staffed by diaspora Iranians and handed an initial $1.5 million of …
Jenin and the new Palestinian resistance
The armoured column drives slowly north out of Jenin. On one vehicle, a bleary-eyed Israeli soldier leans on a massive Vulcan cannon. “Fucking Saigon,” he mutters when I ask about the recent battle. He’s not far off: his unit has …
Iran is teetering on conflict
Europe’s web of alliances has always been almost incomprehensibly tangled. This is one of the reasons we still disagree so vehemently about the causes of the First World War: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand lit a fuse woven from a …
The Kurds fighting the Isis resistance
“George W. Bush is a hero.” General Sirwan Barzani utters these words with quiet satisfaction. “The best thing that happened to Iraq, at least to us Kurds, was its liberation in 2003. He liberated all of Iraq from dictatorship. It …
Mosul and the Law of the Cigarette
“Remember the Law of the Cigarette,” says my fixer Mohammed as we approach a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul. We’ve spent the morning driving through a landscape scarred by the war against Isis. Villages are filled with ruined buildings …
FLASHBACK: The REAL Middle East Nuclear Threat (2018)
FROM 2018: There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is …
Interview 1788 – UN Supervillains Threaten to Dim the Sun – #NewWorldNextWeek
This week on the New World Next Week: the UN admits geoengineering and proposes that they should regulate it; the latest Iran nuke hysteria is a giant nothingburger; and there is more to the new anti-CBDC bill in US congress …
Iran’s ideological war on Britain
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is an idiosyncratic creation of Iran’s revolutionary class that now sits at the centre of the modern Iranian state. In 1979, the Islamic constitution established the group as an “ideological army” — in deliberate …
How Iran’s protests erased the Kurds
After her death, Jina Amini trended under a name her family and friends never used for her. As Kurds living in Iran, Jina’s parents couldn’t register their daughter using the Kurdish name they had chosen. They had to pick from …
The year the West erased women
If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled …