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Posted on November 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Last Sunday the last British combat troops left Afghanistan, and so a chapter of our history ended. Looking back, it is weird to realise that I do not remember, as I do with Iraq, the beginning of the war. In 2001, I was 6 years old – just conscious enough to be able now to recall 9/11, […]
Posted on August 11, 2014 Leave a Comment
The news this summer has been particularly grim; ebola has ravaged Western Africa, massacre has ranged from Ukraine, to Iraq, to Israel-Palestine. These events have rightly dominated the front pages and news bulletins, accompanied by haunting photos of the civilians caught up in them – a little girl in a Gazan hospital, a young boy forced […]
Posted on July 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Once again, Iraq is tearing itself apart. The country’s existence as a cohesive whole is now in more danger than it was at the height of the civil war in 2006/07, when the yearly civilian death count was over 20,000. Now, with a disintegrating Syria providing an ideal base for terrorism, Iraq is being threatened […]
Posted on September 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
I do not remember the Rwandan genocide, nor the Bosnian war; Vietnam and Korea remain raw for many, but are history to me. Instead, I am of the Iraq/Afghanistan generation – I have grown up in a post-9/11 world where foreign policy has been dominated by the War on Terror. The lessons I have learnt […]
Posted on June 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
Sometimes there is a problem to which no one has an answer, to which there is no answer. So it seems with the Syrian crisis – the ‘worst war of our time’ as one Newsnight reporter put it yesterday. Sorry Obama, Cameron and Hollande, for all your good intentions you’ll just have to wait this […]
Posted on December 31, 2011 Leave a Comment
It’s been quite the year. Let me take you back in time and show you how the world changed – mostly for the better. January and February saw most of Europe glued to its television screens as people in the Arab world joined together in open rebellion against the despots who have ruled the Magreb […]
Posted on December 19, 2011 Leave a Comment
I was expecting a quiet start to my Christmas holidays, but this weekend a lot of blog-worthy stuff has flashed across my telly. Therefore I find myself back at the keys, having thought I had time for a break. A tropical storm caused flash floods in the Philippines, which devastated coastal towns and killed 650 […]
Posted on August 22, 2011 Leave a Comment
Over night Libya’s rebel army made the much-anticipated advance on Tripoli and we awoke to an almost-finished battle for the city. The rebels used a two-pronged approach, coming both from Ziltan to the West and Zawiya to the East, forcing Gaddafi’s forces to fight on two fronts. As of this morning the rebels were claiming […]
Posted on May 22, 2011 Leave a Comment
When the first images of bombs lighting up Baghdad were broadcast, I was eight years old. That, to me, is an astonishing fact. Since 2003, 179 British soldiers have died in the operation that brought down Saddam Hussein. Countless American and NATO troops have also been killed. Some 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the […]
Lucy Webster 