By any measure—byline count, battlefield scars or political enemies—Robert Fisk was not just a journalist. He was a force of nature. Over the course of five decades, Fisk redefined what it meant to be a foreign correspondent. He chronicled the modern Middle East with relentless commitment, barbed clarity and often lonely courage, refusing to let history be written solely by the victors. For many, he was a prophet. For others, a provocateur. But few could ignore him.

Born in Maidstone, Kent in 1946, the only child of a World War I veteran and a magistrate mother, Fisk was destined to interrogate power. His father’s refusal to execute a fellow soldier—a quiet act of defiance—left a permanent imprint. It perhaps explains why Robert Fisk, decades later, would challenge empires, criticize the United States and Israel and embed himself not with armies, but with the civilians crushed beneath them.

Fisk began modestly, cutting his teeth at the Newcastle Chronicle before a dispute with the Sunday Express’s John Junor propelled him to The Times. There, he reported on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, before following the collapsing fascist regime in Portugal and, finally, immersing himself in the tumult of the Middle East—a region that would become both his professional calling and personal obsession.

From his base in Beirut, where he lived on and off from 1976, Fisk would go on to cover nearly every major conflict in the region: Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Palestine and beyond. As The Economist put it, he was “one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the Second World War.” But Fisk didn’t just witness history—he forced readers to see it unflinchingly.

His reporting defied standard war correspondents’ routines. He loathed what he called “hotel journalism,” and was often first on the scene—really on the scene—of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the Hama massacre or the bombed hospitals of Baghdad. In the Iran–Iraq War, he suffered partial hearing loss from standing too close to artillery fire. He walked through minefields so his readers wouldn’t walk through illusions.

He spoke Arabic, rare among Western journalists and earned rare access: most notably with Osama bin Laden, whom he interviewed three times in the 1990s. His exchanges with the future al-Qaeda leader read now as eerie premonitions of 9/11. Bin Laden, who once tried to convert Fisk, famously remarked, “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim.” And in a tragic irony, bin Laden later told the White House to read Fisk—not the Qur’an.

After 1989, Fisk found his permanent home at The Independent, where he remained until his death. There, he wrote with the ferocity of a man determined to show readers not the sanitized version of events, but their raw, uncomfortable truth. His prose was incandescent. His moral compass pointed one direction: toward the victim, not the victor.

He rejected the idea of journalistic “balance” when it meant false equivalence. “It is the duty of a foreign correspondent,” he said, “to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer.” That was no slogan—it was his philosophy and his cross to bear. It drew fierce criticism. Accusations of bias, of obsession with Israel, of cozying to enemies of the West. Yet no critic ever accused Fisk of cowardice.

Fisk never aligned with movements or governments. He disdained official narratives and saw through propaganda with surgical clarity. His writing challenged not only U.S. and Israeli policies, but also Western journalism’s complicity in power. After being beaten nearly to death by Afghan refugees—he famously refused to blame them: “If I had been them, I would have attacked me.”

Such views made him controversial, but also irreplaceable.

His books—Pity the Nation, The Great War for Civilisation, Syria: Descent Into the Abyss—are both testimonies and tombstones, chronicling not just wars, but the consequences of centuries of Western meddling. He explained how much of the bloodshed he covered traced back to lines drawn on maps after World War I, something he connected to his own father’s battlefield diaries.

And still, through the devastation, he never stopped questioning: What makes war so natural? Why do we glorify remembrance but forget its lessons? Why do we so easily dismiss the humanity of the people we bomb?

When he died of a stroke in October 2020, world leaders, fellow journalists and readers from across the globe mourned. Some praised his courage, others his defiance. John Pilger called him “one of the last great reporters.” The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins, said journalism had lost “one of its finest commentators.” Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis and countless others lauded his moral force.

Robert Fisk was not without flaws—his Syria reporting, especially on the Douma chemical attacks, attracted scrutiny. But even here, his defenders argued he was doing what he always did: questioning official stories, no matter who told them. His former wife, journalist Lara Marlowe, rejected the label “controversial,” instead calling him “a prolific non-conformist.”

For all his courage abroad, Fisk confessed doubts about the life he chose. He once said, “I wondered whether I had not missed out on life.” But he also knew that what he had witnessed—privilege or curse—mattered. His legacy is not just the wars he covered or the headlines he made. It is the idea that journalism, at its best, is about holding truth above power, victims above victors and people above politics.

In a world of soundbites and spin, Robert Fisk was a hammer of honesty. The reverberations of his work still echo through the ruins he walked.

“I have spent my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the people within those borders burn.”

Now, in the silence he leaves behind, the task falls to those still willing to tell the truth, no matter the cost.

“You can’t be neutral between the fire and the people it burns.” – Robert Fisk.