The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East
PATRICK COCKBURN

Describing the power vacuum left when a king dies and no one assumes the throne, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This, in effect, describes the current chaos in the Middle East. One order has been undermined by war and revolution but, in the absence of anything to take its place, anarchy reigns. And anarchy provides the ideal conditions for extremist ideologies to proliferate.

The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn is a sharp observer of this great unravelling. This new book collects together his diary entries, penned while reporting from the region, along with retrospective analysis in the introduction and afterword. This unusual but effective approach – “eyewitness history”, as he calls it – is designed to give a sense of how events appeared on the ground in real time.