Patrick Cockburn is currently Middle East correspondent for the Independent and worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written four books on Iraq's recent history-The Rise of Islamic State, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, The Occupation, and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn) as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry's Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009, the Foreign Commentator of the Year in 2013, and the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in 2014.

This era of civil wars [in the Middle East] is the main theme of the diaries and writings I produced between 2001 and 2015, and which appear in this book. I want to look at events from two angles: one is contemporary description; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today. Both have their advantages. Eyewitness reporting undiluted by knowledge of later events should have a vividness lacking in accounts written later and a credibility in explaining why people acted as they did. But a retrospective account, written a dozen or more years after the start of the Afghan and Iraq wars and four years since the uprisings of 2011, also has benefits. Common features in these conflicts jump out and make it possible to draw general conclusions about the origin and course of distinct but interrelated events. I have always found it a weakness in discussions of these wars and conflicts that people who are expert about Syria do not have much first-hand knowledge of Iraq and may know little or nothing about Turkey, though developments in any one of these countries cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of the others. I remember attending a conference on Syria just before ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014 and vainly trying to persuade the assembled Syrian experts that the most important development in the region—which was bound to affect the war in Syria-was ISIS growing strength in Iraq. My fellow specialists were politely impatient during my interventions and swiftly returned to discussing exclusively Syrian matters. On the other hand, generalising usefully about anything in history without full command of the details is dangerous because it is too easy to be tempted into over-simple parallels. I remember how, when I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s, my heart would sink whenever visitors would glibly compare the complex situation in the Soviet Union with some country such as South Africa which they knew well, remarking on similarities that did not really exist. This is why I have put many of my ideas about these very diverse and complicated events in a lengthy "Afterword" at the end of this book, following the presentation of the evidence for my conclusions.

Much of my working life during the past 14 years has been spent covering wars in four countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. This adds up to more than four wars because at some moments there was more than one conflict going on in the same country at the same time. For instance, in 2004 the US Army was fighting two very different wars in Iraq, one against a Sunni insurgency in which al-Qa’ida in Iraq played a leading role, and another against the Shia Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. Likewise, in 2015 ISIS was fighting separate wars against the Syrian Army in the centre of Syria and the Syrian Kurds in the north-east, who were aided by the US. In addition to covering these full-scale wars, I was visiting Bahrain, where protests were savagely repressed in 2011. That same year I was in Iran until I was ordered out of the country. Yemen has been teetering on the edge of war ever since I first went there in 1978, but it was only in 2014–15 that it finally collapsed into all-out armed conflict.

I have deliberately left out my writings on Egypt because the country is not at war, though there is brutal state repression and growing guerrilla violence. At the height of the demonstrations in Cairo in 2011 the Egyptian protests were a bright and encouraging example to the rest of the Arab world. Slogans first heard in Tahrir Square were echoed in Bahrain, Sanaa and Damascus. But the protesters never seized state power and two years later Egyptians were under the power of an even more repressive police state than they had experienced under President Hosni Mubarak. The political trajectory is different from the rest of the region.

Patrick Cockburn is currently Middle East correspondent for the Independent and worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written four books on Iraq's recent history-The Rise of Islamic State, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, The Occupation, and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn) as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry's Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009, the Foreign Commentator of the Year in 2013, and the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in 2014.

This era of civil wars [in the Middle East] is the main theme of the diaries and writings I produced between 2001 and 2015, and which appear in this book. I want to look at events from two angles: one is contemporary description; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today. Both have their advantages. Eyewitness reporting undiluted by knowledge of later events should have a vividness lacking in accounts written later and a credibility in explaining why people acted as they did. But a retrospective account, written a dozen or more years after the start of the Afghan and Iraq wars and four years since the uprisings of 2011, also has benefits. Common features in these conflicts jump out and make it possible to draw general conclusions about the origin and course of distinct but interrelated events. I have always found it a weakness in discussions of these wars and conflicts that people who are expert about Syria do not have much first-hand knowledge of Iraq and may know little or nothing about Turkey, though developments in any one of these countries cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of the others. I remember attending a conference on Syria just before ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014 and vainly trying to persuade the assembled Syrian experts that the most important development in the region—which was bound to affect the war in Syria-was ISIS growing strength in Iraq. My fellow specialists were politely impatient during my interventions and swiftly returned to discussing exclusively Syrian matters. On the other hand, generalising usefully about anything in history without full command of the details is dangerous because it is too easy to be tempted into over-simple parallels. I remember how, when I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s, my heart would sink whenever visitors would glibly compare the complex situation in the Soviet Union with some country such as South Africa which they knew well, remarking on similarities that did not really exist. This is why I have put many of my ideas about these very diverse and complicated events in a lengthy "Afterword" at the end of this book, following the presentation of the evidence for my conclusions.

Much of my working life during the past 14 years has been spent covering wars in four countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. This adds up to more than four wars because at some moments there was more than one conflict going on in the same country at the same time. For instance, in 2004 the US Army was fighting two very different wars in Iraq, one against a Sunni insurgency in which al-Qa’ida in Iraq played a leading role, and another against the Shia Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. Likewise, in 2015 ISIS was fighting separate wars against the Syrian Army in the centre of Syria and the Syrian Kurds in the north-east, who were aided by the US. In addition to covering these full-scale wars, I was visiting Bahrain, where protests were savagely repressed in 2011. That same year I was in Iran until I was ordered out of the country. Yemen has been teetering on the edge of war ever since I first went there in 1978, but it was only in 2014–15 that it finally collapsed into all-out armed conflict.

I have deliberately left out my writings on Egypt because the country is not at war, though there is brutal state repression and growing guerrilla violence. At the height of the demonstrations in Cairo in 2011 the Egyptian protests were a bright and encouraging example to the rest of the Arab world. Slogans first heard in Tahrir Square were echoed in Bahrain, Sanaa and Damascus. But the protesters never seized state power and two years later Egyptians were under the power of an even more repressive police state than they had experienced under President Hosni Mubarak. The political trajectory is different from the rest of the region.