THE 9/11 WARS

Patrick Cockburn, just awarded the UK's Foreign Reporter of the Year at the Press Awards, allows us inside his world. Through Cockburn's contemporaneous observations we watch the dominant conflict of our time—the Sunni-Shia war—develop before our eyes, not suddenly in Syria after the Arab Spring as the conventional view holds, but over several years in occupied Iraq. It is in the sectarian conflict that engulfed Iraq following the war of 2003 that patterns were established that would later spill over into Syria with such devastating results.

Cockburn was the first Western commentator to warn of ISIS, so far ahead of everyone else that last year the judges of the British Journalism Awards advised the UK government to “consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead.” His previous book, the critically acclaimed The Jihadis Return, has become the “indispensible” guide to the Islamic State, in the words of the Daily Telegraph.