The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson is in Baghdad: therefore the situation with the masked and scarved gunmen of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) must be serious.
The inextricable tangle of tribal rivalries at the heart of it certainly looks ugly and hopeless. Lebanon in general and Beirut in particular used to be like that in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a wretched internicene conflict of different religious militias. Do-good outsiders who wandered between the jaws of it were taken into darkness for four to five years. Remember Terry Waite, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy?
At least they survived. Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft did not. Accused by Saddam Hussein of spying, he was hanged in March 1990, a fate that was to befall the Iraqi leader after the invasion of Iraq. American journalist Daniel Pearl was captured by Al Qaida in Pakistan, that wonderful country, and beheaded by his captors in 2002. The video of it was posted on the net.
We, for whom a crisis is the telly or the boiler going on the blink or the barn owl population taking a bit of a dip, seemingly don't have the capacity to measure up to the import of these terrible events. If Wayne Rooney or David Beckham had warned (on television news, of course) that ISIS are worse than the Taliban in Afghanistan we might have take more notice.
Instead ISIS insurgents executing Shia men with machine guns came as a bit of surprise on Monday. We thought everybody was watching the World Cup.
One consequence of all this is the turn-around in diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Why, only a few years ago Ben Afleck was making Argo - about the US hostage crisis. Now we're the best of friends with Iran it seems, with the re-opening of the British embassy in Tehran to prove it.
Nothing should surprise us in the murky world of real-politick. Were ISIS to achieve the impossible and take Baghdad, I wonder if the EU would send envoys to the city to work out a mutually beneficial trade arrangement. Or am I thinking of Ukraine?
Tuesday, 17 June 2014
But What Have Wayne or David Got to Say About Isis?
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If I remember rightly, Farzad Bazoft was on the trail of chemical weapons of mass destruction, supposedly being developed by Saddam Hussein's government.
I vaguely remember something about samples of earth, contaminated with something nasty like Sarin.
Anyway, he was caught by Saddam's thugs who probably did not need too much in the way of evidence. I think he was hanged - the same way as Saddam - and his body was then gibbeted pour encourager lest autres before being released for burial.
Many more people are now dying beastly deaths who would probably have survived under Saddam - especially the Christians.
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