Iraq

Three years ago, international attention was drawn to the desperate plight of Iraq’s Yazidis, a largely unheard of ethnic and religious minority. As Isis rampaged across their homeland of Sinjar in Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and taken hostage to serve as prized sex slaves by Isis members. Many of them still remain in Isis-held territory across the border in Syria. Children were brainwashed and recruited to fight for the jihadists, while adults were massacred and left in the mass graves which now litter the mountainous northern districts of Iraq. Those who were able to flee did so to Mount Sinjar, whereon they were surrounded by the

For the title of world’s most benighted city, Mosul takes some beating. Liberated from Saddam Hussein by US forces in 2003, the ancient Assyrian town was pummelled by years of insurgency before being seized by Isis in 2014 and its population subjected to militant theocracy. It has no water supply, no infrastructure, it has been gutted by occupation and there are some 850,000 displaced citizens. The Iraqi government’s long and bloody battle to regain what remains of Mosul culminated this week in a visit by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to declare victory. Many will find it hard to see anything to celebrate, given the destruction that has been wrought in

Since June 2014, when Islamic State attacked northern Iraq, the desks at Mar Ephrem seminary in Hamdaniya, a city 18 miles southeast of Mosul, have stood empty. Today, they are dusty and rooms once teeming with priests and nuns in training are dark; student ID cards, with titles such as ‘Syrian Catholic: Parish of Bashiqa, Iraq’, litter the floor and a statue of the Virgin Mary lies smashed. Now, Isis are gone. But in their wake an eerie quiet remains and the path of destruction is a visible reminder of their legacy, with thousands of houses destroyed in the fierce battle to retake the city last October. And for the Christians who live in Hamdaniya, the question remains: will they

 Massachusetts All politicians wear masks. Donald Trump’s favourite is that of Maximum Leader. It was on display during this past week. ‘If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will,’ he said at the weekend, ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping — a throwaway comment that could end up causing mayhem in the Far East. Next, his reaction to news of a chemical bombing in Syria. Trump blamed the atrocity on his predecessor’s ‘weakness and irresolution’, suggesting that he is keen to show the world what strength and resolve look like. The President, it seems, is not too dissimilar to the nightmare his political enemies warned us

There’s an extraordinary moment in this week’s Holy Smoke podcast when the aid official supervising the resettlement of 12,000 Iraqi Christians says that the latter supported Donald Trump ‘100 per cent’ in the US elections because they felt betrayed by the Obama administration. Stephen Rasche, legal counsel and head of resettlement programmes for the Chaldean Catholics of northern Iraq, confirms that this community – now on the verge of extinction, and due to run out of medicine in 45 days – has received no help from US aid agencies or the United Nations. We recorded the episode on Friday, the day after Rasche had addressed MPs and peers in Parliament. One hopes they listened

The Twitter-cheering for John Bercow, the transformation of him into a Love, Actually-style hero of British middle-class probity against a gruff, migrant-banning Yank, could be the most grotesque political spectacle of the year so far. Not because it’s virtue-signalling, as claimed by the handful of brave critics who’ve raised their heads above the online orgy of brown-nosing to wonder if Bercow is really promoting himself rather than parliamentary decency. No, it’s worse than that. It’s the lowest species of cant, hypocrisy of epic, eye-watering proportions, an effort to erase Bercow’s and Parliament’s own bloody responsibility for the calamities in the Middle East that Trump is now merely responding to, albeit

As the sun set over the frontline in northern Iraq on the first day of the long anticipated Mosul offensive, Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi army soldiers began to celebrate the first victories over Islamic State. Almost a dozen villages had been taken yesterday, and more than 77 square miles liberated southeast of the Isis stronghold. The offensive to re-take Mosul, the last major city held by Isis in Iraq, has been more than a year in planning. It was long anticipated all along the hundreds of miles of frontline where the peshmerga and the Iraqi army have been fighting Isis. When I was in Tel Skuf in June last year, men would

At night, the temperature around the Islamic State-held city of Mosul drops to around 80°F. At the Bashiqa front line, 15 miles northeast of the city, it would feel pleasant and almost calm, were it not for the steady sound of exploding shells. Most of life is tea and cigarettes. It’s like a quiet day on the Western Front, minus the mud. ‘It’s so peaceful you can’t imagine what’s happening — it’s surreal,’ says Allan Duncan, a former soldier with the Royal Irish Regiment who volunteered to join the Kurdish peshmerga here two years ago in order to fight Isis. ‘You almost forget that things are so close to the