Point of no return

Robert William Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was a British journalist, writer and political scientist. As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. An Arabic speaker, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden. Fisk, who worked as the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent since 1989, received many journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times. His books include The Point of No Return (1975), In Time of War (1985), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005),and Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (2015).