CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Book review: The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn
Patrick Cockburn’s excellent book on the jihadis reveals the duplicity of the West in placating and arming the states that give them succour, says KENNY COYLE
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Patrick Cockburn’s latest book is timely to say the least.
As the Western powers oversee a succession of seemingly endless bloody fiascos in the Middle East, Cockburn illuminates the intelligence illusions and diplomatic deceptions of Washington, London, Paris and Brussels that have shaped the murderous onslaught in Iraq and Syria by Islamist extremists seeking to establish a Sunni caliphate in the region.
He charts the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant from a minuscule splinter group into a powerful military and political force.
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RAMZY BAROUD and ROMANA RUBEO analyse how the US has consistently negotiated in bad faith to secure the element of surprise in military attack
VIJAY PRASHAD details how US support for Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa allowed him to break the resistance of the autonomous Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
ALEX HALL follows the battered fortunes of Syria, a multi-ethnic country caught in the crossfire of competing imperialist interests
