Feb 22nd 2013

The Dirty Numbers Game in Syria

by Sharmine Narwani

Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East, and a Senior Associate at St. Antony's College, Oxford University. She has a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in both journalism and Mideast studies.

A trip to Syria last January piqued my interest in the ubiquitous Syrian death toll that accompanies most news items on the country. The overwhelming assumption about these casualty numbers is that they represent dead civilians killed by a brutal regime, but inside Syria I found widely conflicting opinions on who was doing the killing and who was dying.

In my February 2012 investigation I concluded that the UN total of 5,000 victims of violence in Syria included a more diverse universe than what was being portrayed in the media: civilians caught in the crossfire between government forces and opposition gunmen; victims of deliberate violence by government forces and by opposition gunmen; “dead opposition fighters” whose attire do not distinguish them from regular civilians; and members of the Syrian security forces, both on and off duty.


syria22n-5-web


When juxtaposed with the government’s list of around 2,000 dead Syrian soldiers and policemen, it appeared that there was some “parity” in the numbers of violent deaths on both sides. But that information would suggest that the Syrian army was responding in relative proportion to the threat posed, which is not the way we understand the conflict in Syria in the mass media.

The UN stopped counting casualties around that time because escalating hostilities made “verification” difficult. But a year on, it has reinstated its count – this time using seven lists and citing a figure of 59,648 – more than ten times its last number.

Yet this new count gives us no more insight into the nature of the Syrian conflict than the 5,000 number of a year ago. It doesn’t tell us who is killing and who is dying. And that information matters – the global political response to a genuine civil conflict would be different than to a genocide committed by a ruthless authority.

UN High Commissioner For Human Rights Navi Pillay does not attribute the nearly 60,000 deaths to the Syrian government, but neatly implies it by saying things like:

“The massive loss of life could have been avoided if the Syrian government had chosen to take a different path than one of ruthless suppression of what were initially peaceful and legitimate protests by unarmed civilians.”

This kind of complicity by influential officials to obfuscate details about the Syrian death toll continues unabashed. It is little wonder that the crisis gallops ahead today – the “solutions” offered have been based on false premises that have led directly to the weaponization of the conflict, and thus, to a staggeringly higher casualty count.

SOHR disputes the UN’s numbers

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) founder Rami Abdulrahman, whose casualty list is the one most widely quoted by the media, scoffs at the UN’s new numbers and believes they are inflated for “propaganda” purposes. Rami’s list has been used as a primary source in both UN counts, but his figures are on the lower end of the spectrum and he claims high accuracy for only reporting casualties with names or video footage.

“The UN is a political organization,” says Rami, who is amassing “evidence” of falsified data by some of the other casualty counters the UN used. During a lengthy meeting with him in Coventry, England in December, he provided me with anecdotal and video examples:

“Yesterday in Qahtaniyah, near al-Raqqa (northeast of Syria), I had a video of 21 people killed, but 19 names only. Other groups said 40 were killed – where are the 40? Tell them to provide me with only 21 names,” he demands, frustrated.

“Four days ago in Halfaya, the LCCs (Local Coordination Committees) said 200 were killed in an air strike on a bakery. I cannot confirm it was an airstrike and I now have the names of 43 people, 40 adult males and 3 women. The other groups say the majority were women and children! We have no evidence of this whatsoever,” insists Rami, “so why are they playing games with the lives of people?”

Between March 2011 and mid-January 2012, the SOHR has logged 47,605 deaths of which 33,279 are “civilians,” a number which includes non-combatants and nearly 9,000 rebels. Some smaller figures are also included in this count: 1,564 are defectors killed in clashes and 943 are unnamed people who feature on his video records, for example. The SOHR maintains a separate list for Syrian soldiers and security forces, which Rami says earns him the wrath of other opposition groups who don’t want to admit there are dead soldiers. There are 11,819 names on this list.

deathtoll

When asked about the high civilian count, he admits: “I have thousands of rebels in the civilian list. I put all the non-defectors in the civilian list.” Rami later says: “It isn’t easy to count rebels because nobody on the ground says ‘this is a rebel.’ Everybody hides it.”

So how does one gauge how many rebels are embedded in the “civilian” count? Rami’s casualty count for that day, December 27, 2012, may be a helpful guide:

- 103 “civilians” were killed — In Idlib, 24 killed, 18 were rebels, one a leader; near Damascus, 25 killed, 4 were rebels; in Allepo, 15 killed, 7 were rebels; in Damascus, 11 killed, 9 were rebels; in Hama, 10 killed, 5 were rebels; in Homs, 9 killed, 2 were rebels; in Deir Azour, 7 killed, 3 were rebels, one a leader; in Dar’a, 2 killed, 1 was a rebel
- 42 regular army were killed — 19 in Idlib, 4 in Deir Azour, 2 in Damascus, 5 in Hama, 2 in Homs, 10 in Aleppo
- 3 defectors were killed in Reef Aleppo and Hama; one was a colonel.

Rami counts 148 violent deaths in Syria that day – 49 are rebels, 42 are soldiers, 3 are defectors, and the remaining 54 are, according to Rami, likely to be a mix of non-combatant civilians and unidentified rebels. In this count, around two-thirds of the deaths are armed men – an appreciatively different take on the perception of “civilian slaughter” in Syria created by the UN’s un-nuanced casualty numbers.

Peeling the onion further
When I ask UN spokesman Rupert Colville whether 11,000+ Syrian soldiers could be embedded in the UN’s casualty list, he replies: “It’s quite possible. And how many are in these statistics, we just don’t know.”

“The study makes absolutely no effort whatsoever to separate combatants and non-combatants,” explains Colville, adding that the motivation in compiling this list was “for indicative purposes; to gauge scale.”

Since the UN stopped it’s count last year because verification of deaths was getting harder, I asked if they were able to do those kind of checks this time around. “No,” admits Colville, “we can’t prove most of these people have died.”

Megan Price, lead author and statistician of the UN’s casualty analysis project, concurs but explains: “we were not asked to do verification of whether the casualties are real.”

Her firm, Benetech, a non-profit technology company experienced in casualty analysis in conflicts, drew its data from 7 combined lists of 147,349 reported casualties of violence in Syria. They discarded reports that did not include names, place and date of death, as well as duplicates, to arrive at almost 60,000 casualties.

So what’s the point of this UN casualty list if we don’t actually know the data is real and we aren’t even told if Syria’s victims are combatants or non-combatants – let alone who killed them?

Benetech’s data crunching actually does manage to give us a peephole into some casualty demographics that may be the most revealing “facts” we have in this conflict – depending of course on whether the data is real in the first place. Only 7.5% of the recorded dead are female, making this an overwhelmingly male casualty count. Furthermore, the largest segment of the 30% of victims whose ages are included in the records are between the ages of 20 and 30 – what might be classified as males of “military age.”

The combined demographic information could very well suggest that the violence in Syria is largely between armed men on either side and that areas dense with non-combatant civilians are not typically targeted, though some of that clearly occurs.

Alternatively, Colville suggests that the low female death toll may be due to civilians vacating areas of conflict, leaving younger men behind to protect property. This version of events, however, actually bolsters the Syrian regime’s claim that it does not target civilian populations and that it warns civilians to vacate areas before launching military operations against rebels, whether by air or by ground.

images-1Conflict death toll controversy
Maintaining casualty counts during conflict is a tricky business. On one hand, it can help alert the international community to situations of violence, track the scale of the violence over time and act as an important baseline for investigation in the aftermath of conflict.

On the other hand, inaccurate death tolls in recent conflicts, as in the case of IraqDarfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have made casualty counting a politically-charged business. While some death toll disputes are over methodology, the most frequent criticism is that data analysis and subsequent results can be self-serving, more focused on politics and fundraising ambitions than accuracy.

Benetech, for instance, receives funding from the US State Department, a vocal and active advocate for regime change in Syria. For Washington, jacked-up casualty numbers are as desirable in this conflict as they were anathema in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq.  Although physically present in Iraq, the US and British governments were unable to provide estimates of the numbers of deaths unleashed by their own invasion, yet in Syria, the same governments frequently quote detailed figures, despite lacking essential access.

As if to underline the argument against casualty statistics, just last month we heard that Libyan death tolls had been highly exaggerated. Libya’s new government now claims that casualties on both sides have been revised down to around 5,000 each for rebels and supporters of Muammar Gaddafi. Did politics come into play? Recall that NATO intervention was enabled by allegations that Ghaddafi had killed tens of thousands of civilians. Opponents of NATO intervention conversely argue that the aerial bombardment of Libya resulted in 50,000 deaths.

And yet Benetech plans to launch a second phase of this bizarre numbers game for the UN – this time, to fill in gaps for deaths that “may have gone undocumented” in the Syrian conflict. Using analytical tools modeled from other conflicts, the statisticians will essentially extrapolate from the current Syrian casualty data, which they already acknowledge may not be “real” or accurate. In other words: more unverified data to compound the existing unverified data. And more hyped-up numbers to blare from headlines.

Detail matters

“What does it matter who is dying and who is killing? Why should the essential journalistic questions of who, what, where, when and how apply when a hundred people are dying each day?”

Here’s why detail matters. In the past year the Syrian death toll has increased ten-fold. A big part of why this has happened is because of weapons flowing willy-nilly into the hands of unstructured, undisciplined rebel militias with competing ideologies and command structures. The weaponization of the conflict has, in turn, been made possible by non-stop narratives about “regime massacres of civilians and the need for said civilians to defend themselves.”

Provocative attacks on army checkpoints by rebels since early 2011 are not defensivepostures. Neither are car bombs and suicide bombs in urban areas. Nor sabotage and destruction of key infrastructure vital to the citizenry – water, electricity, food factories, etc.

The fact is that, left unquestioned, the narrative of “regime massacring civilians” has scene-set and paved the way for governments hostile to the Syrian leadership toweaponize this conflict – as though this, in itself, was a humanitarian gesture that would “save civilians” somehow.

In whose warped mind does arming a disparate rebellion – representative of perhaps only half the population – against a far more sophisticated centralized army ever change the odds? The weaponization of the Syrian conflict was never to save civilians. It was about increasing the regime’s vulnerabilities and hoping for momentum that may lead to its downfall.

In the interim, this weaponization has killed tens of thousands of Syrians with no obvious signs that arming rebels contributes to the safety of civilians. On the contrary, Syria is scattered with the dead bodies of tens of thousands of these armed men, soldiers and militiamen both. And hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians have been displaced by the escalation of violent conflict caused by militarization.

Yet I see little evidence that the regime-massacring-civilians narrative will be relinquished by those pursuing their own political objectives inside Syria. Qatar just sent $100 million to the “humanitarian arm” of the Syrian opposition – as if there is such a body – because the European Union won’t officially remove an arms embargo. And western politicians are being prodded by self-serving “regime massacre” and “horrible death toll” headlines to consider further weaponization of the crisis.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani’s reasoning behind this new “humanitarian” paycheck: “the rebels only want to be able to defend themselves,” adding that an arms embargo “will only prolong the crisis.”

His British counterpart William Hague – who ostensibly does not send weapons to Syria for good reason, yet does not object to Qatar doing so - repeats a tired refrain about considering all options “to save the lives of the Syrian people.”

Saving lives indeed.

The UN casualty-counting-circus will plough ahead, fanning the flames of armed conflict instead of easing the way to a mediated political solution. But Navi Pillay would be well advised to think twice about participating in this non-contextual, numbers-over-details game in Syria, a country where disputed death tolls feature in its recent history:

Last autumn, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) declassified its report on Syria’s 1979-82 armed Islamist insurgency. The document quite startlingly concludes that the Syrian Army’s infamous assault on Hama resulted in only 2,000 deaths in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, including “an estimated 300-400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elite Secret Apparatus.” The DIA’s 2,000 estimate, which may be unrealistically low, is still a far cry from the 10,000, 20,000 and even 40,000 reported by history books and regime foes alike.

Syria has seen this dirty numbers game before


An abridged version of this article appeared in The Guardian on February 15, 2013

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Nov 24th 2024
Extracts: "We all think, speak, and write within certain intellectual frameworks that we largely take for granted. But, eventually, the passage of time renders familiar categories and ideas obsolete. For example, who still talks about the “Soviet Union” today, apart from historians?" ------- "Trump won decisively despite his contempt for democratic institutions, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and his subsequent 34-count felony conviction. Though voters know about his chaotic approach to governance, his habitual mendacity, and his sinister immigration policies, he won every swing state. Even with full knowledge of who Trump is, more Americans voted for him than for Kamala Harris. We must not mince words: liberal democracy in the US has suffered a lethal blow. It will be under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic, and there is no guarantee that it will survive. After all, can there be any future for the liberal West without the US as its leader? I believe the answer is no." ----- "If Europe fails to come together at this moment of tumultuous change, it will not get a second chance. Its only option is to become a military power capable of protecting its interests and securing peace and order on the world stage. The alternative is fragmentation, impotence, and irrelevance."
Nov 24th 2024
EXTRACTS: "When the US presidential election was called for Donald Trump, the yield on ten-year US government bonds increased from 4.3% to 4.4%, and the 30-year-bond yield rose from 4.5% to 4.6%, with both remaining at those levels ten days later." ----- " Clearly, investors expect the next Trump administration to produce higher government budget deficits and more debt. It is not difficult to see why. During Trump’s first term in office, he added $8 trillion to the national debt – all previous presidents combined had accumulated $20 trillion – despite having promised to run budget surpluses so large that they would eliminate the national debt within two terms." ----- "Supporters often say that a businessman like Trump or Musk will know how to put America’s fiscal house in order. But the smart money says they have no idea what they are doing."
Nov 13th 2024
EXTRACT: "For 2,300 years, at least since Plato’s Republic, philosophers have known how demagogues and aspiring tyrants win democratic elections. The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out." ........ "As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too glaring." ..... "From everything Trump has said and done during this campaign and in his first term, we can expect Plato to be vindicated once again. The Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the US a one-party state. The future may offer occasional opportunities for others to vie for power, but whatever political contests lie ahead most likely will not qualify as free and fair elections."
Nov 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "The likelihood of escalation in the coming weeks and months means that there will be economic and financial risks to manage. A large-enough Israeli strike on Iran could severely disrupt energy production and exports from the Gulf. If Iran gets desperate, it could try to mine the Gulf and block the Strait of Hormuz, while also striking Saudi oil facilities. In this scenario, the world would experience stagflationary shocks similar to those that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "The continuing cycles of violence can easily spiral out of control, precipitating a wider war involving nuclear powers. Moreover, Netanyahu’s goal of 'total victory' against an ideological movement cannot be achieved by military means alone." ..... "So long as both sides seek to inflict maximum damage on the other to right past wrongs, the violence will not end. Netanyahu may think that total victory is in sight, now that Hezbollah is badly damaged and Gaza reduced to rubble, but that is an illusion. All he has done is create more enemies who will want to restore their honor by killing in a war without end."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a 'war of annihilation'. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s – pledged more than once to 'destroy Israel'. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state." ...... "Alas, Israelis have built their own dangerous dream palace of 'total victory', erected on a foundation of nationalist fervor, religious messianism, and political intransigence. There is a scenario in which Israel’s military exploits change the region for the better. Unfortunately, far from being the standard-bearer for some enlightened political vision, Israel’s current government is committed to fighting a war on all fronts, with no view toward any political future that Israel’s neighbors could possibly accept."
Oct 8th 2024
EXTRACT: "But in the real world, slain leaders are replaced. Those who bury their dead do not forget or forgive, and those who have felt the punishment of arms do not forego weapons but embrace them. So it seems unlikely that’s how the story will end. Sadly, it’s far more likely it will never end."
Oct 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: ".....,Russia will probably spend about $190 billion, or 10% of GDP, on the war this year, and that figure presumably represents the peak, given the constraints imposed by Western financial sanctions. Whenever Russia can no longer finance a budget deficit, it will have to cut public expenditures, and its non-military outlays have already been pared to the bone."
Sep 12th 2024
EXTRACT: "Throughout recorded history, crises and tragedies have inevitably spurred apocalyptic interpretations that seek to imbue temporal catastrophes with some divine or redemptive meaning. One can see this in the doctrines of the major monotheistic religions, and even in modern totalitarian ideologies, such as communism and Nazism. One way or another, humans appear inclined to believe that, without Satan, there is no redeemer. To understand just how dangerous this logic can be, look no further than Gaza, where a tragedy of Biblical proportions is fueling the messianic hallucinations of Israel, Hamas, and American Christian evangelicals alike."
Aug 7th 2024
EXTRACT: "China knows that the war has had catastrophic consequences for both Russia and Ukraine. Estimates indicate that Putin’s conflict in Ukraine could cost Russia US$1.3 trillion (£1.0 trillion) and at least 315,000 in troop casualties. So, win or lose, the post-war damage to Russia would be immense. This is bad news for China. Not only will it have a weakened ally, but the west could then have a free hand to consolidate its resources in dealing with the 'Chinese threat'."
Jul 27th 2024
EXTRACT: "......, regardless of the folly of political violence, the attempt on Trump’s life was futile inasmuch as ridding America, and the world, of Trump, would by no means rid us of Trumpism, which was and remains a symptom, and not the root cause, of this country’s moral and epistemic decline. How else could so many millions of Americans support this man? No one can claim that they do not know what he stands for (insofar as he stands for anything other than himself) or what his intentions are: he has made it very clear that his second administration will be not only authoritarian, but fascist in rhetoric and deed.
Jul 17th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Iran unveiled a digital clock counting down the days to the destruction of Israel in 2040. The display, located in Tehran’s Palestine Square, embodies the Islamic Republic’s long-held commitment to annihilating the Jewish state. Some view this promise as a mere rhetorical exercise...." ----- "From Adolf Hitler to Vladimir Putin and even Osama bin Laden, history has taught us to take threats of ideologically inspired attacks at face value. " ---- "......., the key enabler of Iran’s war of attrition is, in fact, Israel’s own government. Netanyahu’s unrealistic goal of achieving 'a complete victory' in Gaza serves Iran’s strategy of miring Israel in an inconclusive conflict while orchestrating a long-term plan to destroy the Jewish state." ----- "It turns out that the only truly irrational, trigger-happy fanatics in this lethal equation are Netanyahu and his theo-fascist allies, who are determined to engage in an apocalyptic war in Gaza and Lebanon." ---- "These messianic hallucinators have a willing collaborator in Netanyahu. Together, they are doing more to annihilate the Jewish national project than Iran could ever hope to achieve on its own."
Jul 16th 2024
EXTRACTS: "In her dissenting opinion in Trump v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared that with the majority’s ruling, 'the President is now a king above the law'. In this, she is wrong: the majority opinion has given the US president far more power than English kings had at the time of the American Revolution." ---- "In June 1686, 11 of the 12 hand-picked justices ruled in favor of the king. Echoing the king’s own solicitor, Sir Thomas Powys, the Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys contended that if the king did not have leeway above the law, 'the preservation of the government' might be in jeopardy." ---- "In 1689, the English people roundly rejected such reasoning and asserted that their kings would thereafter be subject to the law. They set a precedent by removing James II from office. The Supreme Court’s decision goes beyond threatening more than two centuries of American jurisprudence; it overturns four centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The Roberts majority did not give the president the power of an English king; it gave the president power that an English king could only covet."
Jul 4th 2024
EXTRACT: "Most American voters who believe that Trump is the best defender of democracy are not fascists, much less communists. The very thought would horrify them. But they almost surely have a strong opinion on who constitutes the true American people: God-fearing, hard-working, and most probably white. And they worry that these ordinary Americans are being displaced by illegal immigrants, and that their way of life is being threatened by new ideas about gender, race, and sexuality emerging from elite universities. Trump is stoking these fears and exaggerating these threats. His line that the US courts are attacking not only him, but every right-thinking American is horribly effective. Since he is heard as the true voice of the people, he is the purest democrat. As a result, liberal democracy might not withstand another four years of his rule."
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "....the debate showed all too clearly that he is suffering cognitive decline and cannot possibly serve as a competent president for another four years. If Biden is true to his word, and stopping Trump from regaining the presidency is his overriding goal, he needs to announce that at the Democratic Convention in August, he will release his delegates from their obligation to vote for him, and instead ask them to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump."
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACTS: "Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court have just announced grand opinions trying to resolve the fundamental constitutional issues raised by former President Donald Trump’s claim to absolute immunity" ---- "According to Sotomayor, who wrote for the three dissenting justices, Roberts’ sweeping grant of immunity has 'no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.' ” ----- "For what it’s worth, I think that Sotomayor is right and Roberts is wrong." ----"But for now, it is much more important to consider the objection raised by Justice Amy Coney Barrett to both Roberts’ constitutional glorification of the presidency and Sotomayor’s devastating critique of Roberts’ majority opinion." ---- "Barrett is right to ask why Roberts and Sotomayor did not join her in adopting the problem-solving approach that they have repeatedly endorsed in many other contexts." ---- "Roberts took the path that not only betrayed Founding principles, as Sotomayor argued, but also betrayed the very principles to which he has dedicated his entire career. "
Jul 1st 2024
EXTRACTS: "Netanyahu’s disdainful criticism of Biden. Netanyahu knows how indispensable the US is to Israel, as no country has provided Israel with more financial, military, and political support than the US. And no American president has ever been more supportive and committed to Israel's security than President Biden. But then, leave it to the most loathsome Netanyahu, who dares to criticize the president for suspending the shipment specifically of 2,000-pound bombs to continue with his devastating bombardment of Rafah that could indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent civilians." ---- "All Israelis who care about their country’s future must rise and demand the immediate resignation of this corrupt and brazen creature who inflicted untold damage on the only Jewish state, making it a pariah state."
Jun 12th 2024
EXTRACTS: "One of the more amusing exercises on the economic calendar is the International Monetary Fund’s annual review of the United States. Yet while everyone knows that the US government pays absolutely no heed to what the IMF has to say about its affairs, the Fund’s most recent Article IV review of the US economy is striking for one unexpected finding. Readers will be startled to learn that, in the IMF’s estimation, US government debt is on a sustainable path." ---- "What then could go wrong? Well, US institutions could turn out not to be so strong. Donald Trump has a personal history of defaulting on his debts. As William Silber has observed, Trump in a second presidential term could instruct his Treasury secretary to suspend payments on the debt, and neither Congress nor the courts might be willing to do anything about it. The gambit would be appealing to Trump insofar as a third of US government debt is held by foreigners. The damage to the dollar’s safe-asset status would be severe, even if Congress, the courts, or a subsequent president reversed Trump’s suspension of debt payments. Investors in US Treasuries would demand a hefty risk premium, potentially causing the government’s interest payments to explode."
Jun 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "An all-too-familiar specter is haunting Europe, one that reliably appears every five years. As citizens head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, observers are once again asking whether far-right anti-European parties will gain ground and unite to destroy the European Union from within. To be sure, skeptics of this doomsday scenario have always argued that the far right will remain divided, because nationalist internationalism is a contradiction in terms. But it is more likely that specific policy disagreements – mainly over the Ukraine war – and drastically diverging political strategies will prevent Europe’s various far-right parties from forming a 'supergroup.' ”
Jun 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "While the dreadful legacy of his Conservative predecessors – the morally vacuous Johnson and the reckless Liz Truss – would make it extremely difficult for Sunak to offer a credible vision of a better future, many of his current problems are self-inflicted. For example, he supported Johnson’s bid for the Conservative leadership, a decision that reflects poorly on his judgment. Sunak has also been a Euroskeptic since he was a schoolboy and was an early supporter of Brexit."