From 2001 until today, Patrick Cockburn’s coverage of the conflicts in the Middle East and other regions has been outstanding. His chronicles make use of his extensive direct experience and in-depth knowledge of the region’s history to offer fine-tuned analysis in the midst of very complex crises. For instance, he upheld that the Western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would be unsustainable and that it was very likely that the Libyan rebels would end up facing off against each other. Perhaps what is most surprising is that he reported on the advent of ISIS as the main force in the region even before the British government’s intelligence services were aware of the threat it represented. This led the jury of the British Journalism Awards to ask itself “whether the authorities should study the possibility of sending the MI6 as a whole into retirement and hiring Patrick Cockburn to replace them.” Written in the form of a fascinating diary, this book combines a careful selection of Cockburn’s writings from the war fronts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The event will be attended by Patrick Cockburn, a journalist for The Independent and the the book’s author, as well as Daniel Iriarte, a journalist for the daily El Confidencial, and Karim Hauser, who heads Casa Árabe’s Governance area.

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has worked in the Middle East as a correspondent for the Financial Times. From 1991 to the present, he has been with the British newspaper The Independent. He has also been a correspondent in Moscow and Washington and frequently contributes to the London Review of Books. He has had four books published on the recent history of Iraq: The Rise of Islamic State (2015), which analyzes how ISIS was able to create its own state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria; Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Irak (2008); The Occupation (2006), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle in the non-fiction category, and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (2006), written with Andrew Cockburn, as well as an autobiographical book, The Broken Boy (2005). Throughout his career, he has received numerous acknowledgments for his work. In addition to other awards, he received the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize for 2005, the James Cameron Award in 2006 and the Orwell Journalism Award in 2009, and he was chosen Foreign Commentator of the Year in both 2013 and 2014 (a British journalism award).

Daniel Iriarte. Second chief editor for the International section of the daily El Confidencial and a journalist specializing in the Mediterranean and Middle East, where he has worked for fifteen years. From 2009 to 2015, Iriarte resided in Istanbul, where he reported on regional current events for the newspaper ABC and other media, such as COPE and Telecinco. He has provided in-depth coverage on topics such as the Kurdish insurgency, the unrest in Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt, the frozen conflicts in Cyprus and the Caucasus region, and the wars in Libya and Syria. He has traveled extensively throughout the entire region. He was one of the writers in the collective books El retorno de Eurasia (Eurasia’s Return, published by Península, 2011), Estado Islámico, la yihad en el poder (Islamic State, Jihad in Power, published by Dyskolo, 2015)  and “¿Qué queda de las revueltas árabes? (What Is Left of the Arab Uprisings?, published by Catarata, 2015). He is also a co-director of the feature documentary film El rumor de la arena: historias del Sáhara Occidental (Rumor in the Sand: Stories from the Western Sahara, 2006).

He is currently writing a book on Turkey’s recent political history.