Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews is an Associate Editor of The Spectator and the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Diary – 5 November 2005

From our UK edition

Baghdad Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us. Last week the Palestine hotel, home to many journalists here, was almost demolished by a particularly telegenic truck bomb. The neat mushroom cloud rose a thousand feet into the sky, shedding a geometrically near-perfect

Ankara should be wary of Brussels

From our UK edition

Earlier this month Turkey’s bid to join the European Union crept past the tipping point from possibility to probability. The European Commission recommended that accession negotiations be opened with Ankara, and the outgoing enlargement commissioner Günter Verheugen announced that ‘no further obstacles remain’ on Turkey’s path. The news sent the Turkish press into frenzies of

Bagged by the USA

From our UK edition

Owen Matthews goes on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s ‘Indian Country’ and sees them capture and interrogate suspects It was one of those wonderfully luminous Afghan days, the spring sky a vibrant baby-blue, the heat of the day cut by a breeze which blew though fields of poppies and winter barley. We were on

Something fishy for Haddock

From our UK edition

If there is any justice in the world, Captain Duane Haddock of US special forces is due a medal. He was, we can reveal, the first coalition soldier to find something approaching concrete evidence of Saddam’s evil arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; to wit, a trailer believed to be a mobile bio-weapons laboratory found

‘The minarets are our bayonets’

From our UK edition

Istanbul I have no doubt that Allah moves in mysterious ways. But if He has chosen Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instrument of His vengeance on the infidel, He must be given credit for startling originality. Erdogan, whose party won a landslide victory in Turkey’s recent general election, may be feared in some quarters as