Robert Fisk

Things are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Yesterday's horrors proved that. Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America's deputy director of military operations, assured us that there was only an "uptick" in violence in Iraq.

The black flags of Muharram are draped over the front of the School of Arts, banners of mourning erected by Shias at the vast campus of the University of Baghdad.

I was standing on my balcony in the darkness, puffing on a fine Havana - I had just filed my day's report to The Independent's foreign desk - when I saw the soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division padding down the road outside.

He was drugged, kidnapped and locked up for 18 years after revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to the world. Next month Mordechai Vanunu is finally set to be released, but just how much freedom will he be allowed?

It doesn't take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin.

Savaşta gün boyunca hayatta kalmaya çalışırsınız. Geceleri de uçak ve bomba gürültüsünden uyuyamazsınız. Ertesi gün uyanık olup hayatta kalmak zorundasınızdır. Sonra bir an gelir elinde yarım somun ekmek tuttuğunu sandığınız bir adamın, elinde yarım bir bebek tuttuğunu farkedersiniz.

When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.

Each time I return to Iraq, it's the same, like finding a razor blade in a bar of chocolate. The moment you start to believe that "New Iraq" might work - just - you get the proof that it's the same old Iraq, just a little tiny bit worse than it was last month.

As Iraq reeled beneath savage and almost daily suicide bombings, US forces yesterday doubled the reward - from $5 million to $10 million - for the capture of Musab Zarqawi, an obscure and little-known associate of Osama bin Laden whom they claim is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq.

The women's faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims.

Maybe my driver had a premonition. All the way back from Basra, he was nervous, anxious not to stop at villages - even petrol stations - for fear of thieves.

Cigarette sellers don't have names. They said he was called Fouad but even the shopkeeper whose nephew drove the wounded, screaming man to hospital didn't know his family name.

A severed arm with a hand still attached to it lay a few metres from the broken gates of the mayor's office in Karbala yesterday, a piece of humanity every bit as bloody as the story of the seventh-century Shia martyr Hussein, the golden dome of whose shrine could be seen through the smog to the eas

Just this week, a company commander in the US 1st Infantry Division in the north of the country admitted that, in order to elicit information about the guerrillas who are killing American troops, it was necessary to "instill fear" in the local villagers.

Insurgents are civilians. Tanks that crush civilians are traffic accidents. And civilians should endure heavy doses of fear and violence

The problem I have with the whole Gaddafi saga is that the Libya I know can scarcely repair a drain or install a working lavatory in a hotel.

Schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America's famous "insurgents". In Samarra - for which read Fantasyville - he was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city.

The thump of air pressure on the window wakes me up, a blast of sound that gently shakes the walls; the sound of 17 lives disappearing. Bombs in Baghdad are a daily heartbeat, the aftermath a kind of obscene theatre.

An Iraqi interpreter for the US forces, his bespectacled face cowled in an Arab kaffiyeh scarf, showed me a photocopy of a bearded man dancing at what must been a wedding, his hands held aloft, grinning at the camera.

While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein, US troops have shot dead at least 18 Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country.

If only we could have got rid of this man 15 years ago, how warm would be our welcome in Iraq today

There was a kind of satisfaction, lying inside Saddam's last hole in the earth.

"Peace" and "reconciliation" were the patois of Downing Street and the White House yesterday.

Saddam in chains; maybe not literally, but he looked in that extraordinary videotape yesterday like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian at last cornered, the hand caressing the scraggy beard.

The Australians paid the price for the alliance with Bush in Bali. The Italians paid the price in Nasiriyah. Now it is our turn

Onların hikâyesi, "teröristlerin" ve "güvenlik güçlerinin" kıyasıya savaştığı Ortadoğu'da, hem Ariel Şaron hem de Yaser Arafat için olağanüstü ve utanç verici bir suçlama niteliğinde.

No one remembers the Palestine Regiment. Even this morning, on the actual day of remembrance, few will recall that Arab and Jew once fought together under the British flag against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

We created this place, weaned the grotesque dictators. And we expect the Arabs to trust Bush's promise?

Osama Bin Laden has an awful lot of friends in Saudi Arabia. In the mosques, among the disenchanted youth, among the security forces, even ­ and this is what the West declines to discuss ­ within the royal family.

In Australia they're even trying to prevent Hanan Ashrawi from receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize