Justin Marozzi

Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ narrative, he did what every good reporter does: ‘I learned the language, grew a beard and hit the road like a local.’ The result was No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. In its refusal to stick to the script – especially American and British propaganda about all the ‘progress’ which later proved so illusory – the book recalled Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam exposé, Dispatches.

Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it. It Started in Damascus is part history, part memoir, the story of a people whose hopes for a better life have been consistently strangled by the Assad dynasty for more than half a century. A Syrian-born writer and analyst who comes from a distinguished diplomatic family, Allaf is unflinching when she trains her sights on regime depravity. It makes for disturbing, compulsive and at times heart-in-the-mouth reading.

Marc Lynch is angry. The word ‘rage’ appears six times on the first page, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book. That is not to say that Lynch, who runs the George Washington University’s Middle East programme, is not worth reading. On the contrary, and despite the occasional lapse into the sort of political-science-speak favoured by academics, he is a fierce and compelling voice.

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the ten military encounters he has summoned between Christendom and the caliphate over the past 1,300 years.

Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed as academic nonentities. One minute Ikbal’s journey across the Middle East was 15,000 miles, the next it was 25,000 miles Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was the great-grandson of Jan Fishan Khan, a 19th-century Arab nobleman who had supported the British in Afghanistan and been rewarded with an Indian title, palace and pension.

In 2014, with the Middle East convulsed by the murderous, self-styled Islamic State, a Daily Mail reader wrote a letter to the editor which began: ‘Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain...’ Aubrey Bailey went on to describe the dizzying complexity of diplomatic relationships thrown into turmoil: So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting our other enemies, whom we don’t want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win... And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out – do you understand now?