Nearly three decades after the horrific gas attack by Saddam Hussein, Kurds are waiting for the world to recognise a genocide.
In seeking to understand the roots of Islamic State, we’ve tried to spread the net wide, but make no claim to being comprehensive or having the final word.
Reuters/Stringer; David Wise/Flickr; Reuters/Stringer; EPA/Sanjeev Gupta; Reuters/Fadi Al-Assaad; Royal Geographical Society/Wikimedia Commons; Reuters/Stringer; AAP/Asmaa Abdelatif; Reuters/Stringer
Our series on understanding Islamic State attempts to catalogue many of the forces and events that can arguably have played a part in creating the conditions necessary for these jihadists to emerge.
U.S. soldier keeps watch over detainees in Iraq, 2009.
Atef Hassan/Reuters
The ACLU describes the release of photos of DoD detainees as an important victory for the cause of transparency, but are they?
Civilian doctors might not know that their patients have served in the military. In this photo Marines march around the World Trade Center memorial after participating in a memorial run in 2012.
MarineCorps NewYork/Flickr
Asking ‘Have you served in the military?’ may seem like a minor issue, but it’s actually much more important than you might think. And it’s a question that few doctors make a point of asking.
Assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, Iraq’s army has never amounted to much – and it’s not the first foreign-built military to fail so spectacularly.
Tony Blair is given the US Congressional Medal of Freedom by George W Bush.
Reuters/Jason Reed
An individual may remember and forget what he or she likes, but once a version of past events is accepted and shared by a group, as a collective construction, it is on public record.
That sinking feeling: Sir John Chilcot.
Reuters/Matt Dunham
Whatever position you take on the Iraq Inquiry – whether you see it as an establishment stitch-up, or whether you think it might actually tell the truth about Britain’s decision to go to war in Iraq in…
On the face of it, Iraq and the US Federal Reserve share little. One is a country plagued by division, war and mayhem since the US invasion of 2003. It is a brutal world where there are no friends, few…
ISIS victories in Iraq do not come out of the blue; the group’s military success results from a long history of tensions between Sunnis and Shia and US policies that fostered such tension.
In American Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is the ‘sheepdog’ – someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack.
Entertainment Weekly
Many are decrying the film as merely conservative propaganda. But American Sniper – as with many of Eastwood’s films – has a more nuanced approach that addresses modern anxieties.
Showing loyalty to the King in Amman
Muhammad Hamed/Reuters
Thousands of Jordanians - including the country’s Queen Rania - took to the streets of the capital Amman February 6. They were protesting the burning alive of the Jordanian fighter pilot Moaz al-Kasabeh…
How many of these do we really need?
Matt Sullivan/Reuters
In his recent budget announcement, President Obama staked out a negotiating position with Congressional Republicans by offering a sense of symmetry: a 7% increase in the military budget to balance out…