Program Note: Watch Anderson report LIVE on the Gaza crisis from Israel tonight on AC360° at 10pm ET.

CNN’s Nic Robertson reports on the plight of children caught in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Nic Robertson | BIO
Senior International Correspondent

There is a new fight against Bin Laden, al Qaeda and their fellow radicals. It’s coming from within Islam and may yet prove the most powerful agent for transforming the Saudi terror leader from radical Islamist Icon to a has-been hero.

Taking down one of his best loved web sites is only the beginning. Much, much more is happening behind the scenes. Muslims angry Bin Laden is giving Islam a bad name are fighting back.

I’m hearing it from guys as diverse as those that fought along side the Al Qaeda leader in the anti Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan to British Pakistani’s frustrated their children are being singled out for ridicule for being un-Islamic by their peers. These Muslims want to do something and they are.

Waseem Mahmood, a British Pakistani helped get a bunch of popular Pakistani pop stars to record a song decrying Bin Laden type terror. It was an instant hit staying at the top of the Pakistani charts for several weeks. He followed up with a SMS, phone text message petition for Pakistanis to sign up if they were against terrorism. More than 60 million did, that’s more than a third of the population, massive when you consider most of us think of Pakistan as a very Conservative Muslim nation. Mahmood is getting ready to grow that number.

Keep reading

Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
_____________________________________________________

Nic Robertson | BIO
Senior International Correspondent

It’s hard for me to see clearly what’s on the blurry cell phone video from Afghanistan.

Are there children and women under those blankets, were as many as 90 people killed in a US air strike as Afghan and UN officials suggest. The countries lawmakers believe so, they want strict controls put US troops. I just don’t know.

But what is painfully clear to me the strengths and weaknesses the coalition had in it’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks are not only unchanged after 7 years, but threaten to unravel the hunt of the worlds most wanted terrorist.

When bin Laden fled with hundreds of die-hard al Qaeda fighters to the mountains of Tora Bora in western Afghanistan for his last stand against the coalition, the coalition made a fatal mistake.

Keep reading

Troops of Pakistan para military force patrol in troubled khyber tribal area, 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of Peshawar, Pakistan on Thursday.

Nic Robertson
Senior International Correspondent

It’s been over a year since I’ve been in Pakistan.

For the longest time I couldn’t get a visa, my reporting on former President Musharraf’s failed policies to take on the Taliban had apparently won me powerful enemies Pakistani insiders told me. But that’s all changed now.

The former military dictator is out of power and the new government says it wants to open it’s doors to all reporters. Political leadership isn’t the only thing that’s changed. When I was last here Spring 2007 the Taliban were a growing problem in the border region, now they are much stronger and the government is waging an increasingly violent war against them.

When I pick up the daily news papers here the headlines are dominated by reports of pro government tribes taking on the Taliban, government jets bombing Taliban hide outs. It was never this way before.

Keep reading

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic during his initial appearance at the U.N.'s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, Thursday.

Nic Robertson
Senior International Correspondent

Editor’s Note: Nic attended the first day in the war crimes trial of former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. This is what he saw.

When he first appeared, he seemed almost like a school boy who knows he’d done wrong, diligently following the instructions of his three tribunal guards, not at all the bombastic, flamboyant Serb leader I remember from my years covering the Bosnian war.

Radovan Karadzic was looking older, thinner in the face. But whatever he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face. He sat staring straight ahead, unflinching, unemotional as the judge read the charges. Accusations of the most heinous crimes — genocide, extermination and murder.

The first flicker of something behind the stony façade was a half wry smile. Judge Alphons Orie asked if he planned to have defense lawyer, Karadzic said, “I have an invisible advisor. I don’t need a lawyer.” I was instantly reminded of his more obscure moments during the Bosnian war when he would state something so obviously full of contradictions that it defied logical explanation.
Keep reading

Australia Minister of Defense Joel Fitzgibbon and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert entering the Pentagon on July 16 to discuss a possible troop surge in Afghanistan

Nic Robertson
Senior International Correspondent

Every time I go to Afghanistan I hear the same thing.
We are short of troops, we are short of helicopters, we are short of money to put things right.

No surprise when I embedded with the 24th MEU in southern Helmand province I heard the same complaints again. Only this time, a very big difference. The comments were made by a General on camera not privately in a back room briefing. Every time in the past, apart from a few constructive comments about more money nobody was willing to rock the boat publicly and call it like it was, undermanned.

Gen Dan McNeill, the four star who was until a few months ago in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan and who is a genuinely nice guy to boot, talked around the subject with me in an almost hour long interview last year. He just didn’t want to say he was short of what he needed most, troops. Sure he said the Afghan army needed to train more men with greater speed, and that the Afghan police we woefully underprepared for their task. But on troops, he said he had all those he needed to do the job he’d been told to do.

Keep reading

The death toll in taking down the Mehdi Militia in Baghdad’s Sadr city slum is climbing. We only get an overall death toll from the Ministry of the Interior here so it’s hard to tell how many militia members are being killed. Today they said 20 people had been killed, 87 wounded, among them women and children. 
 
That’s going to be a problem because the Mehdi Militia will say the civilians are being targeted by US and Iraq troops. Although it’s a blatant lie, it is incredibly frustrating for American commanders. Iraqi government officials tell us when they try to take humanitarian aid in to neighborhoods worst affected by the fighting, militia men attack them and scare residents away from getting help.

The information war is a very hard one to win….
Keep reading

Watching Ambassador Crocker’s and General Petraeus’s testimony today I heard nothing that would surprise Iraq’s leaders. Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh found the assessment fair although he sees more room for optimism now than has done for several years. Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s crackdown on the Mehdi militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr is a point in case for Saleh. He told me this evening by taking on his own Shia constituency the Prime Minister has taken a big step toward garnering more support from Sunnis and Kurds, increasing the possibility of political compromise and advancing the country on a unified nationalist agenda.

Keep reading

CNN’s Nic Robertson sees the fighting in Sadr City and discovers the city isn’t under government control

What was weird about going in to battle in Sadr city was leaving with the fighting still raging. The best way I can describe it is like going home from a football game before the final whistle.

We were sprinting away from the fight, across open alley ways where snipers lay in wait to take you down if you hesitate. Automatic gunfire was bursting through the air and I wanted to go back. I wanted to know who was going to win.

Keep reading

I’d been in Baghdad for the first Gulf War and was probably one of the first journalists to get to the bomb shelter when the bombs started raining in.

AC 360 takes a look back at the start of the Iraq War and where it stands now five years later. WATCH: “Shock & Awe: 5 Years Later” airs Saturday & Sunday night, 11p ET

My grandfather had told me during World War Two he always knew German bombers were on the way to London way before the bombs fell, because the dogs started barking.

For that reason I was listening at my open window in the Al Rasheed hotel that January night back in 1991. Sure enough, the dogs barked, then the bombs fell. With the first flash I was already half way down the stairs leaping half a floor at a time.

Needless to say, I was no sooner secure in the bunker than I wanted to get out and see what was happening. Iraqi officials blocked the way. Peter Arnett, John Holliman and Bernie Shaw hid out upstairs and made TV history. I made a mental note, next time stay out of the bomb shelter!

So 12 years later when we got the call ’shock and awe’ was about to begin I knew what I must do.

My head was saying go upstairs, my gut was telling me head for the basement…

Keep reading