As I wrote earlier, one of the most amazing sections of Deb Cowen’s amazing book is about how after its closure, Camp Bucca was transformed into Basra Logistics City. Today, yet another article has come out about how Camp Bucca was the incubator for ISIS/Da’ish: Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors. […]
One of the most trenchant points that Deb Cowen makes in her superb book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, is that labour mobilisation is a form of “obstruction” that is securitised by shipping companies and states and crushed, precisely because it becomes a kind of chokepoint for the circulation of goods. And if the goods cannot […]
I grew up with a number of Persian-language classic novels on the bookshelves of our house. Throughout my childhood (I was a precocious reader) and teenage years, I tended towards Sadeq Hedayat and Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. A bit predictable really. My father was from the south; Jahrom, specifically. He had a soft spot for a number […]
I discovered something interesting that somehow I had managed to miss all those years ago about the massacre at Karantina… Years ago, I wrote in my first book (which was based on my PhD research) which also included stories about the Phalange massacres of Palestinians (and others) living in the Karantina area of Beirut. As […]
It seems like Mohammad al-Fayed (of Harrod’s fame – and obviously many other ventures) was also in the port business. In 1964, he entered a deal with Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, whereby he invested $5 million in the harbours, established pilotage and ports, and in return was to receive the income from the […]
The world’s top three shipping lines are, in order, Maersk (Denmark’s second largest company after Lego), MSC (a privately-held Italian firm), and CMA CGM (a French firm). Some time ago, they decided that they were going to start up an alliance, P3, that would have allowed them to share vessels, thus streamlining which ports they would […]
The Guardian reports that the Libyan legislature has taken refuge in a Greek car ferry: A Greek car ferry has been hired as last-minute accommodation for Libya‘s embattled parliament, which has fled the country’s civil war to the small eastern town of Tobruk. The 17,000-ton Elyros liner has been deployed, complete with its Greek crew, […]
The segment of my January/February container-ship journey I am most anticipating is passing through the Suez Canal. Here is what Horatio Clare writes about his passage through Suez: Unfinished wars lie under all our horizons. The chart on which Chris plotted our approach to the canal shows Egypt, the Sinai, the southern end of Israel an Gaza. […]
The Super Hornet bombers that dropped 8 500-pound JDAM bombs on Islamic State forces in Iraq had flown from the aircraft carrier USS George H W Bush, afloat in the Persian Gulf. It is one among at least 5 Navy ships and 3 ships belonging to the US Marines in the Gulf right now. The news struck me because […]
This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and Qais sitting on the back steps, vaguely matching in short-sleeved plaid shirts, whiling away the […]
