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Robert Fisk: Frightening winds swirl around the House of Saud 11.11.2003 COMMENT Osama bin Laden has an awful lot of friends in Saudi Arabia. In the mosque, among the disenchanted youth, among the security forces, even - and this is what the West declines to discuss - within the royal family. Saudi ambassadors routinely dismiss these facts as "unfounded", but Sunday's attack in the capital, Riyadh, is part of a growing insurrection against Bin Laden's enemies in the House of Saud. Whether or not the bombers were Saudi security force members - they were certainly wearing Saudi military uniforms -...

Understanding the brain. That's what you have to do in a guerrilla war. Find out how it works, what it's trying to do. Ramadan? An attack on US headquarters in Baghdad and six suicide bombings, all at the start of Ramadan? Thirty-four dead and 200 wounded? Where have I heard those statistics before? And how could they be so well co-ordinated - not sophisticated, perhaps, but well-timed, down to the last second? And why the Red Cross? I knew that building, admired the way in which the International Red Cross staff refused to associate themselves with the American occupation -...

How arrogant was the path to war. As President Bush now desperately tries to cajole the old UN donkey to rescue him from Iraq - he who warned us that the UN was in danger of turning into a League of Nations "talking shop" if it declined him legitimacy for his invasion - we are supposed to believe that no one in Washington could have guessed the future. Messrs Bush and Blair fantasised their way to war with all those mythical weapons of mass destruction and "imminent threats" from Iraq - whether of the 45-minute variety or not - and...

What United Nations country would ever contemplate sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq now? The men who are attacking America's occupation Army are ruthless, but they are not stupid. They know President George W. Bush is getting desperate, that he will do anything - that he may even go to the dreaded Security Council for help - to reduce United States military losses in Iraq. But yesterday's attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad has slammed shut the door to that escape route. Within hours of the explosion, we were being told this was an attack on a "soft target", a...

BAGHDAD, 28 July 2003 — The convoys were humming down the highway from Amman to Baghdad all last week, trucks groaning under the weight of hundreds of tons of pre-stressed concrete, giant blocks and heaps of cement on the trailers, each one higher than the average lorry. I understood what they meant: protection from car bombs. I had seen them so often in Beirut when the US Marines first came under fire in 1983. The “liberators” of Beirut were becoming the occupiers. Now the same is happening in Iraq. The “liberators” are turning into aggressive raiders, kicking down doors and...

Back in Baghdad, the Independent's Robert Fisk told his readers on Thursday: "At the Alastrabak grocery store, I bought 25 loo rolls." Ah, the bog of war. When we Bush poodles say, "Let's roll!", this is definitely not the kind of roll we have in mind. Fisk is either settling in for a long siege or padding his expenses, but I can't say this strikes me as a 25-roll war. On the television, the network pretty boys are riding on the backs of tanks going full throttle through the southern desert, hour after hour. Will it all be over before...

So they are dead. Or are they? Even Baghdad exploded in celebratory, deafening automatic rifle fire at the news. The burnt, bullet-splashed villa in Mosul, the four bullet-ridden corpses, America's hopes - however vain - that the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, will break the guerrilla resistance to Iraq's US occupation troops, all conspired to produce an illusion last night: that the unidentified bodies found after a four-hour gun battle between Iraqi gunmen and US forces must be those of the former dictator's sons - because the world wants them to be. Of course, they might...

A few days ago, the American forces in Baghdad drove 17 truckloads of rubble and dirt up to the secret military area of Baghdad airport to air-freight to the United States. No journalists reported on this macabre operation, even if they knew about it. For the muck came from the site of an atrocity committed by the US Air Force at the end of its bombardment of Iraq. The Americans believed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a suburb called Mansour and so, despite knowing that the area was packed with civilians - the operation would not be "risk-free", as one...

US Leans On Belgians to Spare Sharon From Trial Friday, July 11 2003 @ 07:06 PM GMT By Robert Fisk For The Independent Mohamed Shaukat Abu Rudeina believes that his family will never receive justice. “It’s all over,” he says. “The world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001. The Americans rule the world.” A few yards from his concrete breeze-block home, the bullets that killed his father and uncle still puncture the walls. In 1982 up to 1,700 Palestinians were massacred here, in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla. The Israeli Kahan Commission stated that Ariel Sharon — then the...

8.30amIndependent introduces web chargesCiar ByrneThursday April 24, 2003The Guardian The Independent: hoping to bring its website into the black  The Independent is following in the footsteps of the Times and the Financial Times by charging users to access parts of its website.Selected areas of Independent.co.uk, including opinion pieces, articles by celebrated Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, the news and sport archive and the cryptic crosswords, will carry a charge from this week.While much of the site's content will remain free, the Independent is hoping to bring the website into the black by erecting barriers in these four areas as part...

What is a journalist’s life worth? I ask this question for a number of reasons, some of them – frankly – quite revolting. Two days ago, I went to visit one of my colleagues wounded in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Samia Nakhoul is a Reuters correspondent, a young woman reporter who is married to another colleague, the Financial Times correspondent in Beirut. Part of an American tank shell was embedded in her brain – a millimetre difference in entry point and she would have been half paralysed – after an M1A1 Abrams tank fired a round at the Reuters...

WAR WITH IRAQ Rioters Stab L.A. Times ReporterBy Paul WatsonTimes Staff Writer April 16, 2003 MOSUL, Iraq --[...] But the mob wanted blood, and I could see two men who had pulled out knives. "Let me through — I want to kill him!" screamed one. After several minutes of struggling and stone-throwing, the mob knocked me to the ground and kicked me repeatedly in the head and back before stabbing me in the buttocks.[...]

BAGHDAD, 15 April 2003 — So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives — a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents including the old royal archives of Iraq — were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the Islamic Library of Qur’ans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have...

Reading Robert Fisk April 06, 2003 I've been reading the Iraq War reports of Robert Fisk. There's a certain loonyness there: "So it's a "truly remarkable achievement"... General Tommy Franks says so... the British still have not "liberated" Basra... the Iraqis... launch a scud missile from the Fao peninsula... the Americans... lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant farmer... spend four days trying to cross the river... confronted by their first suicide bomber.... Even the "siege of Baghdad" -- a city which is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to...

<p>Cable News Network reported that of 400 initial tanks in the Iraq army at the outbreak of war, only an estimated 12 remain.</p>

United States troops have begun moving through downtown Baghdad.United States Officials said members of the 3rd Infantry Division began driving through the center of the Iraqi capital on Saturday.They said the unit did not sustain casulties.'This was an operation conducted by two task forces of the Third Infantry Division,' Major General Eugene Renuart Chief of Operations for Central Command, said.They had been south of the city and conducted a raid through the city, proceeding North to the Tigris River and continuing out to the West in the direction of the airpoirt.'Officials said the show of United States troops was meant...

SADDAM HUSSEIN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - So where are the Americans? I prowled the empty departure lounges, mooched through the abandoned customs department, chatted to the seven armed militia guards, met the airport director and stood beside the runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets -- an old 727 and an even more elderly Antonov -- stood forlornly on the runway not far from an equally decrepit military helicopter. And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds which have nested near the airport car park on this, the...

In Al-Mussayib, central Iraq — The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves...

'Iraq will become a quagmire for the Americans. Our troops will not surrender' 24 March 2003 Iraq stunned the Americans and British last night by broadcasting video tape of captured and dead American troops – the nightmare of both George Bush and Tony Blair. The body of one American soldier was seen with a great red gash on his neck, while five US prisoners appeared on screen. One, a black female soldier, had been wounded, while a male serviceman said he had been "only following orders". The film will increase internal support for Saddam Hussein, because it will be...