Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war
Eastern Ukraine For a moment, the sound of shelling is drowned out by a thumping beat coming from a camouflaged van. ‘Separatysty [Separatists]!’ says the rousing chorus: ‘The day of your death is here!’ We are with a Ukrainian nationalist militia in a village outside Donetsk airport, which is in the hands of pro-Russian
Blue and white Christmas lights twinkle over the shops near my apartment in Beirut’s Christian quarter; pricy boutiques display elaborate nativity scenes. But people are having trouble getting into the festive mood. ‘Do you think the war will come here?’ asks my landlady nervously, not for the first time. There is no rush to battle,
Turkish/Syrian border ‘They asked $5,000 to $10,000 for every move they made. Emirs are making a living by such means’ It was Abouday’s heavy metal T-shirt that started the trouble. Two jihadis at a checkpoint said the fire-breathing dragon showed he was a devil worshipper. In fact, he worshipped only Metallica, but he did not realise
Turkey, Syria It is the early hours of the day that Parliament votes on whether to bomb the so-called ‘Islamic State’ — and we are sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Kurdish smuggler’s house. He has a picture of Mecca on his wall, a gold watch on his wrist, and an open bottle of
The horrific situation in Syria and Iraq means both aid workers and reporters are urgently needed, but as the awful murder of British hostage, David Haines shows, it’s now virtually untenable for any foreigner to try to help. As Paul Wood wrote after the murder of Steven Sotloff, hostage taking has become a $100 million
Lebanon The Beirut press corps gather to remember the murdered journalist Jim Foley. People stand for a minute’s silence, drink in hand. Below the balcony, the nightly Beirut traffic jam sends the sound of car horns floating upward. Before killing him, the so-called Islamic State emailed his family: ‘The scum of your society… are held
Arriving in Erbil, you don’t feel you are in Iraq, but another country altogether, which is what the Kurds would like. The city’s outer ring is shiny and new, a touch of Dubai in the smooth highways and glittering hotels. A London property developer told me he had made a 40 per cent return in
Turkey, Syria, Iraq: ‘It’s jihad, innit, bruv.’ The young British Muslim cut an absurd figure in ski mask, dark glasses and hoodie. He had not used that exact phrase but it would have summed up our faintly comical encounter. I remembered a security analyst’s remark that British Islamists in the Middle East are best explained
In the passport queue at Baghdad airport, my heart sinks. This place vies with Cairo for the title of most venal airport in the Middle East. Our luggage is minutely examined by the Mukhabarat, or secret police, then customs. Early morning becomes mid-afternoon. Our papers (scrupulously in order) lie unattended on a desk. Eventually, a
Amman — Beirut — Istanbul I recently bumped into a senior officer with the rebel Free Syrian Army who was waiting in the passport queue at the Turkish border. I didn’t recognise him at first, out of uniform and without his entourage, and I told him so. He was following the example of the
Beirut Ilyas was, he told me, the very last Christian to flee Qusayr. He had been one of just a handful in the town to join the revolution — an odd thing for a Christian to do because the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were and are mostly Sunnis, and the Christians mostly sided with Assad.
Ghadi had spent the past two years on the run from the Syrian regime but it was the rebels fighting against the government, the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) who finally caused him to abandon the revolution and flee Damascus. He had made the mistake of speaking out against one of the big FSA brigades
Near Damascus ‘Remember: what we do, we do for God,’ said the rebel commander to the huddle of his men at the foot of the mountain. They divided up their ammunition. They had so little — one clip’s worth was shared between two Kalashnikovs. They set off, a line of men stretching into the dark,
Homs province Between the distant pop of the mortar when it’s fired, the pressure wave, and the roar of the blast five or six seconds later when it lands, the rebel fighters recited the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith. ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.’ ‘We do this in
Homs, Syria Hassan the smuggler got on his motorbike and disappeared up a dirt track that led from Lebanon into Syria. He did not return and an hour or so after nightfall we heard long, echoing bursts of automatic fire. Hassan had been captured by a Syrian Army patrol, said one of the villagers. No,
Into battle with Libya’s middle-class rebel army Nafusa mountains, Libya ‘My people, did you forget what you got from this tyrant Gaddafi? Only pain, death and humiliation!’ The commander of the Tripoli Brigade was rallying his men at a rebel base not far from the frontline in the western mountains. ‘Stand up, in his face,
Sangin, Afghanistan ‘You don’t want to end up on a bracelet or on a fucking T-shirt. If you see people that need to die, kill them,’ said the US Marine Corps sergeant, briefing the convoy about to leave. It was night and we were setting off along the main road out of Sangin. Highway 611
It is 3 a.m. in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and the Horse Shoe nightclub is a tableau to inflame the Jihadi heart with rage. To thumping music, Yemeni prostitutes cavort with fat, thuggish-looking local men. The tables are dotted with bottles of single malt costing $500 each (almost a year’s wages for the average Yemeni).
Paul Wood says that Israel’s ‘shock and awe’ in Gaza caught Hamas off-guard and was a ferocious demonstration of willpower. But the Islamist organisation is far from finished A couple of months ago in Gaza, I found myself sitting across a table from a young Palestinian woman who had volunteered to become a suicide bomber.
A little after 2 a.m., in the small town of ad Dawr, south of Tikrit, Captain Ahmed of the Iraqi army was leading his troops on one of their regular arrest raids. Half a dozen men from one particular house were dragged out, hands bound with plastic flexi-cuffs, and lined up. But the man they’d