Patrick Cockburn

There are some things that could hold it together, notably oil revenues. But at the moment, the much vaunted surge has had…

— Patrick Cockburn

Mosul stands rally at a sort of juncture of sectarian and ethnic differences.

— Patrick Cockburn

I don't think the whole of Iraq would be under al-Sadr, but I think he would be the predominant force on the…

— Patrick Cockburn

Young Shia who have been brought up with nothing, who are pretty anarchic, pretty dangerous. In 2004 when they came close to…

— Patrick Cockburn

Muqtada leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the…

— Patrick Cockburn

But from the moment George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam, the people who were going to benefit here were the Shia, who…

— Patrick Cockburn

Muqtada is radical in the sense that he wants the U.S. occupation to end and has always said so from the beginning.…

— Patrick Cockburn

Despite the fact that there's billions of dollars sitting in the Iraqi government reserves, somehow they are incapable of getting it out…

— Patrick Cockburn

You know, if you want to meet a lot of Iraqi leaders, the best places are the hotels in Amman or in…

— Patrick Cockburn

There's a lot of expectation in the Middle East that post-Obama there will be a sort of tougher U.S. line on Assad,…

— Patrick Cockburn

Muqtada belongs to the most famous religious family in Iraq, which is the al-Sadr family. He's really the third in line. [Muqtada's…

— Patrick Cockburn

Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have…

— Patrick Cockburn

It's always sort of amazing, sitting in Baghdad, to watch visiting dignitaries being received in the Green Zone by politicians who have…

— Patrick Cockburn

Everything that happens in Iraq affects countries outside.

— Patrick Cockburn

A defeat for ISIS in Iraq will be defeat for ISIS in Syria.

— Patrick Cockburn

There are sort of Kurdish districts there in Mosul, or there used to be, but the Kurds mostly fled or were driven…

— Patrick Cockburn

“Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.”

— Patrick Cockburn

In 2014, everybody kind of knows that the Iraqi army fled when it was attacked by ISIS. But actually, the Kurdish Peshmerga,…

— Patrick Cockburn

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War…

— Patrick Cockburn

One of the problems with the media covering this place is that there are stereotypes of news, one of which is "war…

— Patrick Cockburn