James Snell

Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, are returning to Britain. We might think of witchcraft as a thing of the past; sadly, this isn't the case. In multicultural Britain, folk practices like witchcraft and sorcery are more common than you might expect. Alongside the practice of witchcraft, there is also its opposite: accusations that others, particularly children, are witches, or demons, or possessed by spirits. In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments flagged possible abuse linked to faith or belief, which includes witchcraft, and also things like spirit possession, and claims about the presence of demons or the devil. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments, according to official statistics.

One of the perils of working in or even travelling to the Middle East and Central Asia is that there is a high risk of being taken hostage by autocratic states or terrorist groups. Peter Reynolds, 79, and Barbie, his 75-year-old wife, are the latest Brits to find this out the hard way. The couple, who have been running projects in Afghanistan for 18 years, were detained by the Taliban in Afghanistan on 1 February. Their children have heard nothing from them for a fortnight. The grim reality is that they might be left languishing as hostages for some time. A former colleague of mine at the New Lines Institute, Elizabeth Tsurkov, has been a hostage of either the Iranian regime or a proxy force of that regime for over 700 days.

Some people went mad when Ahmed al-Sharaa (you might know him as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the now de facto leader of Syria) refrained from shaking the hand of Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, when she visited Damascus this week. Not shaking hands with a woman! Al-Sharaa is the same jihadist he always was! Another story which fixates westerners: the bars in Damascus – the centrepieces of the Assad regime’s propaganda tours, where journalists and vloggers were made pleasantly drunk within earshot of concentration camps – do they still serve their favourite poison?

Gradually, and then suddenly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. This century’s most evil tyrant has fled Syria, and Damascus has fallen to the opponents of the regime. Across the country, a new political reality reigns. In towns and cities across Syria, the regime’s torture chambers are being opened, and the prisons liberated. Men whose adulthoods have been stolen from them by the tyrant are emerging into the fires of day. Brothers are being united after being separated for 40 years. They were separated when one was 18 and the other younger, because the elder of them fell foul of a regime patrol and was taken away for torture for the remainder of his natural life.

Provincial capitals falling before an unexpected advance. Military units allegedly defecting, deserting or switching sides. Talk of a coup in Damascus. The Syria of 2012 is the Syria of 2024. For years this was a so-called ‘frozen conflict’. The front lines did not move, no matter how many artillery and aerial attacks there were on civilians in the country’s north. The maps did not change, though dozens of people at a minimum were killed in fighting every week. But now Syria’s civil conflict has reignited. From their portion of Idlib province, a broad coalition of armed groups led by the Islamists Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have taken over a significant swathe of territory.

Should Ukraine have nuclear weapons? This is a question that was raised, a little insincerely, by President Zelensky recently as he discussed Nato membership and its alternatives. If Ukraine was not in Nato, Zelensky mused, the only alternative would be to look for protection of another kind: nuclear arms. A recent story in the Times said that Ukraine could make a ‘rudimentary’ nuclear bomb ‘within months’ if Donald Trump withdrew Ukraine’s military assistance. Russia has not used its nuclear weapons, but they have been the major reason no western power has directly intervened on Ukraine’s side. Ukraine had its own nuclear arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union left it with a significant stockpile.

Donald Trump has won his third presidential election and across Europe heads are exploding. This should not be the case. Many European leaders were briefed earlier this year that a Trump victory was more likely than not. But wishful thinking appears to have defeated grim experience in many minds and many civil service buildings. To hear the Europeans tell it, they are now confronted with a unique threat. The last time Trump was in office, Ukraine had been fighting Russia since 2014, but its survival was not hanging by a thread. It was not seriously likely that Russia would invade Moldova, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, as now seems possible.

The semi-regular speeches given by the heads of Britain’s intelligence services are always described as a ‘rare intervention’, and yesterday it was the turn of Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, to issue one of these periodic warnings about the safety of the nation. McCallum noted that although his favourite subjects (terrorism, Russia, Iran and China) have featured in prior ‘rare interventions’, some things have changed. The ‘shifts underneath present the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen’, he said. We are living in a more dangerous world and our enemies are working together. They share the same goal: bringing more murder and mayhem to Britain.

Fighting is raging once again in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a power struggle between rival factions has claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Around 185 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured in the wake of an attempted coup. A US diplomatic convoy came under fire yesterday and the EU's ambassador in Sudan, Aidan O'Hara, was reportedly assaulted at his home. Journalists have been detained and beaten up by soldiers for breaking newly-imposed curfews. Across Sudan, international agencies, non-governmental organisations and charities are scrambling for a solution to prevent further bloodshed. Military aircraft have flown low over urban centres and engaged targets on the ground.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is in Britain for a surprise visit. ‘Freedom will win – we know Russia will lose,’ he told a joint session of Parliament in Westminster Hall this afternoon.  This address is the first he has given in Westminster since a video message in March 2022, when the situation for his country was vastly grimmer than it is now. Last year, when he addressed MPs, Zelensky had just rejected a British attempt to evacuate him and his family from Ukraine. He was under threat of assassination; and his country’s capital faced siege and – as Foreign Office officials still insisted – the brand of Russian destruction like that suffered by the Chechnyan capital Grozny and the cradle of Syrian civilisation, Aleppo.

Natural disaster always worst affects those who have already lost so much. And so it is in Turkey and Syria, where a double earthquake has killed more than 1,900 people. Across both countries, there are widespread scenes of destruction: apartment blocks reduced to rubble; gas supplies cut off in the middle of a freezing winter; survivors left to try and pluck their relatives from the rubble. Much of Syria’s population is displaced and living in refugee camps whose temporary buildings are hardly structurally sound. A million Syrians, forced to flee their homes, are living in poor accommodation across Turkey. In Syria itself, the country is still in ruins after a decade of civil war.

The Islamic State may have been driven out of its capitals in Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa but that doesn't mean it has disappeared. In the Philippines, West Africa, and most obviously in Afghanistan, the terror group is thriving. Isis's tentacles have also spread to Pakistan. Over the weekend, in Peshawar, a terrible bombing took place in a mosque. At least 95 are dead, and hundreds have been injured. It remains unclear who is to blame for this atrocity, but, tragically, it is not the first time a place of worship has been targeted. In March 2022, the Afghan detachment of Isis bombed a Shia Mosque in Peshawar. More than 60 people were killed in that attack and nearly 200 injured.