“I like monkey”, Mao-be chirped as he scooped meat with his fingers from inside a skull. ‘The brains are the best,’ he enthused, his mouth full.Mao-be and his friend Noe-be were chomping at the well-charred body of a monkey that they had caught that morning.

Noe-be held a curled up tail: ‘This is also tasty – like beef but sweeter’. [Read more...]

Tea and Al-Qaida sympathy

The Guardian, 6 August 2007

Channel 4 will allow a radical Muslim to voice his support for terrorism in a primetime slot tonight. Director Phil Rees says the media have a duty to air all sides of the debate.

Abu Muhammed is a courteous, intelligent man. We first met in a London hotel earlier this year. He is of slight build and softly spoken. We sipped tea and discussed events in the Middle East.

Abu Muhammed, which is not his real name, is also linked to al-Qaida and in tonight’s Dispatches on Channel 4, he justifies the July 7 bombings. “If somebody commits an aggression against you, you are allowed [in Islam] to commit an aggression against him. [Read more...]

Daily Booze

4 June 2007

Few industries have changed as dramatically during the past two decades as my industry – the TV news business. Newsrooms have become chrome and glass citadels to advances in communication technology. News has become a celebration of the instant transmission of information around the world. News organisations, mostly owned by multinational entertainment conglomerates, aspire to represent the beating heart of globalisation. In their headquarters, rows of television monitors display a world of constantly fluctuating share prices, live feeds from press conferences or, occasionally, real-time combat from the front line of war. [Read more...]

Two Nations

Slow Food Magazine, 12 March 2007

The British writer and broadcaster Phil Rees joins a Muslim family for dinner and discovers that discussions about eating practices within Islam are never far removed from politics.

‘You are not leaving,’ Zahid told me, grabbing my hand. I edged toward the door of the house but was pushed from the back by his brother. A plate had been set for me on the dining table and I had no option but to join the Siddique family for dinner. Other from claiming to be on a strict diet of prosciutto and red wine, it is impossible to turn down the invitation to join a Muslim family for a meal. [Read more...]

Phoney war on terror

5 February 2007

Observations on intelligence

If you hear on the radio that an “intelligence-led” operation had resulted in arrests, you might feel reassured. Yet the invasion of Iraq, the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes and the storming of a house in Forest Gate in London last August were all “intelligence-led”.

The quality and sources of intelligence became a critical issue during my examination of the fate of the Belmarsh 12 for Dispatches. [Read more...]

At home with the terror suspects in a state of limbo

The Sunday Times, 4 February 2007

Phil Rees has spent months with some of the suspected terrorists released from Belmarsh but now growing suicidal under house arrest

This is possibly the last Sunday afternoon that a devoted father will spend with his five children. Before dawn on Tuesday morning, officials from the Home Office will arrive at his house and escort him to Gatwick airport and a one-way flight to the country of his birth, Algeria.

He is not being forcibly deported; he has decided to leave voluntarily. “I feel like I’m torturing my own family by staying with them,” he told me. “The only way to protect them is to leave.” [Read more...]

My journey into Kabul

BBC Online, 2 December 2001

Phil Rees records his trip into Kabul as the Taleban left the city

Abdul Majid, a commander with the 710th Holy Warriors’ Brigade, stood atop his mud-built fort on the frontline north of Kabul. He bellowed orders into his radio: “By sunset, reach as far as you can walk. God willing, they cannot resist the Mujahideen.” Taleban forces defending Kabul had melted into the late evening sun. Abdul Majid turned to me: “We are going to reach Kabul.” While officially described as the Northern Alliance, these soldiers still refer to themselves as Mujahideen – Islamic fighters who repelled the Russians from Afghanistan in the 1980s. [Read more...]

Haunted by the past

Guardian Unlimited, 24 April 1999

When Phil Rees went to Belgrade to make a film about Serbia’s first couple, a disturbing picture emerged 

Western governments have been certain that President Slobodan Milosevic will respond as a statesman – however nationalistic – to military force, such as this week’s bombing of his party’s headquarters and his official residence in Belgrade. But maybe they’ve got the wrong man – or rather, woman. I went to Serbia just before the war began to make a documentary about Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mirjana Markovic, and as I listened to many prominent people – one of whom has since been murdered – I heard about them as a couple who seemed like Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu just before the Romanian revolution: he driven by her, and she driven by the demons of her past. [Read more...]