Terror, exodus and Donald the chump

Will we remember 2015 most for its grisly succession of terrorist attacks, or for the ceaseless flow of refugees out of the Middle East and North Africa?

The two phenomena — linked at source in the mutating form of Islamic State  — were constant themes in the year. Here are some of most significant: 

JE SUIS CHARLIE

Terror struck Paris just one week into 2015 when two French brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly newspaper, killing 11 people inside, including some of France’s best-known cartoonists, and a passing policeman.

Terrorism was to return to the French capital with a vengeance. On November 13, Paris was the scene of slaughter as gunmen swearing allegiance to Islamic State  shot dead 40 people  in bars and restaurants and another 90 at a concert in the Bataclan concert hall, in France’s worst terrorist atrocity since 1945.

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GREECE: SYRIZA RISES AND FALLS

In January, the radical-left Greek party Syriza burst on to the European political scene promising to roll back Brussels-imposed austerity.

But by July, the grandiose promises of Greece’s fresh-faced prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his motorbike-riding finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, had been crushed by German fiscal rectitude and the cold realities of Greece’s debt burden.

After imposing capital controls,  Tsipras was forced into a  climbdown, signing a harsh memorandum of understanding with Greece’s creditors.

TERROR BEYOND THE WEST

One of the bloodiest massacres in recent history took place in the first week of January 2015 when Boko Haram raided two Nigerian towns beside Lake Chad.

The Islamist gunmen massacred the inhabitants of Baga and Doron Baga, killing hundreds — perhaps thousands — of defenceless people.

The final death toll remains unknown; what is certain is that large areas of both towns were razed to the ground. Satellite pictures released by Oxfam showed the blackened ruins of 3720 structures.

This was the worst in a series of incidents that made 2015 a year of terrorism in Africa. While Boko Haram tormented northern Nigeria, the gunmen of al-Shabaab did the same in Somalia and Kenya. Their worst outrage came on April 2 when al-Shabaab took over Garissa University in Kenya, calmly murdering 148 staff and students.

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THE BATTLE OF DEBALTSEVE

On February 12, Vladimir Putin joined Angela Merkel and their French and Ukrainian counterparts to announce a second Minsk ceasefire agreement, designed to end the war in eastern Ukraine once and for all. Almost immediately,  Putin’s allies broke the deal. Russian-backed separatist rebels — spearheaded by elite Russian troops, supported by Russian artillery and commanded by Russian generals — mounted a new offensive, completing a textbook encirclement of the Ukrainian-held town of Debaltseve.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The US saw a new wave of controversial police shootings of young black men, leading to renewed protests as the Black Lives Matter activist group used social media to galvanise people into action.

Perhaps the most high-profile death was that of Freddie Gray, 25, a young black man who was arrested for carrying a knife in Baltimore. While in a police van, he fell into a coma and died a week later.

There were renewed protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in 2014.

In November, police in Chicago released a video which showed black teenager Laquan McDonald, 17, being shot dead by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke. The officer was charged with murder and there were large-scale protests.

On June 17, nine black people were killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by white gunman Dylann Roof, who had hoped to start a race war.

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MIDDLE EAST TURMOIL

Fighting radical Islamists has been described as like playing whack-a-mole: you hit them in one place, and they crop up in another.

The alliance of forces combating Islamic State  began 2015 on a positive note, when US-led air strikes in northern Syria helped the Kurds push the terrorists out of the town of Kobane. But Islamic State managed to reverse that momentum with two advances in the space of a week — and to do so in their usual eye-catching way.

First they took the city of Ramadi, in central Iraq, after a long siege. A series of 37 suicide bombs delivered in armoured trucks and diggers finally broke the defenders’ resistance. Then in Syria they drove Assad regime forces out of the city of Palmyra, with its glorious classical ruins. They put their new conquest to — literally — dramatic use. They lined up captive soldiers on the stage of the Roman theatre and filmed them being executed with a bullet in the back of the head.

Later in the year, they followed up their destruction of various ruins in Iraq with their most wanton attack on Middle Eastern history to date, blowing up Palmyra’s Triumphal Arch and the Temple of Baal.

THE DONALD

It was a candid-camera parody of a presidential announcement. Donald Trump, his bouffant blond hair perfectly coiffed, descending an escalator to the tune of Rockin’ in the Free World by Neil Young.

He would Make America Great Again, the real estate mogul told the audience inside his shimmering Trump Tower in New York. But immigrants had to stop coming to the country; especially Mexicans, who were largely “drug dealers” and “rapists”, he said.

And so the most controversial candidate in recent US   history burst into the race to the White House. He has since attacked women, mocking the looks of Carly Fiorina, his Republican rival, and insulted the US  war hero John McCain. He has proposed banning Muslims from entering the  US.

Trump has broken every rule in the electoral book, and still rises inexorably in the polls.

US, IRELAND OK GAY MARRIAGE

When the US Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was legal across the nation in June, President Barack Obama called it justice that “arrives like a thunderbolt”.

In Ireland, gay marriage arrived even more suddenly.

Within the course of a generation, public opinion had turned from overwhelmingly against, to strongly in favour. That shift was borne out by a referendum in May, in which 62%  of voters cast their ballot in support of gay marriage.

One month later, it was a bitterly contested 5-4 court decision that brought the same result in the US.

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THE YEAR OF THE MIGRANT

It was the picture that awoke Europe to the human horrors of the migration crisis that had been breaking on its shores all year: the lifeless body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down on a Mediterranean beach.

For a few weeks in September, at least, that pitiful image opened Europe’s hearts to the million or more migrants sweeping into the continent, many driven from Syria and Iraq as the international community failed to deal with Islamic State and the escalating Syrian civil war.

Not everyone was so welcoming, however. Hungary’s right-wing leader Viktor Orban put up a barbed-wire fence instead of a welcome sign.

 German chancellor Angela Merkel threw open the gates of Germany and was initially applauded for her generosity of spirit. But as the year wore on, and other European nations flatly refused to take EU-imposed quotas of migrants, the public’s patience ran out and  Merkel faced a political backlash at home, with Germany struggling to absorb some 800,000 migrants.

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PLANES KEPT FALLING

It was a year in which we all scoured the scene, via our screens, for wreckage. Last year  was a disastrous year for aviation — the worst in the history of the industry, with the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine and the disappearance of MH370. But 2015 scarcely felt any better.

In March, the world was shaken to the core when Andreas Lubitz, a 27-year-old pilot with GermanWings, committed suicide by crashing a plane with 150 people on board into the French Alps.

And in November, tragedy struck once more when a plane full of Russian tourists returning from an Egyptian holiday exploded over the Sinai desert, killing all 224 people on board. Investigators now widely believe it was the result of a bomb smuggled on to the plane. President Vladimir Putin vowed revenge.

Then Russia was hit again — this time on a military mission, when Turkey shot down one of its jets heading to Syria. Yet more wreckage for our weary eyes.

... AND SOME CRISES AVERTED

In December, the US and Britain formally accepted a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency  that Iran was no longer researching technology related to nuclear weapons. The agency concluded that all such research ended in 2009.

Other developments also reduced the risk of conflict. At the start of 2015, it seemed possible  China and Japan would come to blows over a disputed island chain in the North China Sea. By the middle of the year, however, China had switched its focus to other territorial disputes with smaller neighbours.

The Paris climate change conference in December produced a global agreement to limit the rise in average temperatures to two degrees. In a bloodsoaked year, the world acted to reduce a few significant risks.