There's a lot of expectation in the Middle East that post-Obama there will be a sort of tougher U.S. line on Assad, there will be more intervention and so forth. But I don't know if that's going to be fulfilled. If there is more intervention, then I think it's going to go the same way as these other interventions that we've seen in Iraq, we've seen, to a degree, in Syria, we've seen in Libya, you know, that they do really badly. They make bad situations worse.

Young Shia who have been brought up with nothing, who are pretty anarchic, pretty dangerous. In 2004 when they came close to killing me, and of course they have killed very large numbers of other Iraqis. That's a major source of strength for Muqtada.

It's always sort of amazing, sitting in Baghdad, to watch visiting dignitaries being received in the Green Zone by politicians who have usually very little support and seldom go outside the Green Zone.

One of the problems with the media covering this place is that there are stereotypes of news, one of which is "war rages" and the other is "peace dawns." And there isn't much in between. When I talk to foreign journalists, often they are gritting their teeth because they've been asked for a piece about how shops are reopening and restaurants are reopening and so forth - happy pieces. And it just ain't so.

Muqtada leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population, and of poor Shia - and most Shia are poor. Otherwise the place is full of sort of self-declared leaders, many of whom spend most of their time outside Iraq.

Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have their own agendas.

There are sort of Kurdish districts there in Mosul, or there used to be, but the Kurds mostly fled or were driven out. The same is true of the Christians.