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'Combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with Apocalypse Now as it builds towards its terrible climax...Extraordinary' New York Times Iraq's 'Triangle of Death', 2005. A platoon of young soldiers from a U.S. regiment known as 'the Black Heart Brigade' is deployed to a lawless and hyperviolent area just south of Baghdad. Almost immediately, the attacks begin: every day another roadside bomb, another colleague blown to pieces. As the daily violence chips away, and chips away at th...

Patriotic Ayatollahs explores the contributions of senior clerics in state and nation-building after the 2003 Iraq war. Caroleen Sayej suggests that the four so-called Grand Ayatollahs, the highest-ranking clerics of Iraqi Shiism, took on a new and unexpected political role after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Drawing on previously unexamined Arabic-language fatwas, speeches, and communiqués of Iraq’s four grand ayatollahs, this book analyzes how their new pronouncements and narratives shaped publ...

The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East, from the winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess, the new self-declared caliphate poses a threat to the political status quo of the whole region. In The Rise of Islamic State, Patrick Co...

Was the Iraq war really about oil? As a senior oil advisor for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and briefly as minister of oil, Gary Vogler thought he knew. But while doing research for a book about his experience in Iraq, Vogler discovered that what he knew was not the whole story-or even the true story. The Iraq war did have an oil agenda underlying it, one that Vogler had previously denied. This book is his attempt to set the record straight. Iraq and the Poli...

Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words. The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them vetrans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. Evan Wright was the only reporter with Frist Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces,...

Winner of The Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award for Excellence in U.S. Army History Writing – Journals, memoirs and letters, June 2008 Shortly after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the war in Iraq became the most confusing in U.S. history, the high command not knowing who to fight, who was attacking Coalition troops, and who among the different Iraqi groups were fighting each other. Yet there were a few astute officers like Lt. Col. Christopher Hughes, commanding...

Among the various Muslim communities that were articulating their doctrinal positions in the early Islamic centuries, one in particular was known derisively as the Ghulat ('extremists'). This was owing to their specific interpretation of Islam, which included an 'extreme' devotion to the Shi?i Imams and the family of the Prophet, and controversial religious ideas, such as the transmigration of souls into other human or sub-human forms. Widely active in Iraq in the 8th and 9th centuries, the Ghul...

Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and...

Historical fiction Book of the Month in The Times To the god of old things To the gods of the riverbank To the god of hunters Assyria, in the reign of Ashurbanipal. For Aurya and her daydreaming brother Sharo, every day is a struggle for survival, as they dodge the beatings of their drunken father and scrabble for scraps of food. One violent evening, everything changes. Soon, they are on the barge of King Ashurbanipal, bound for the beautiful, near-mythical city of Nineveh. Their fates become...

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family's Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home and rejecting the peculiar food they ate. But when Benjamin had her own child, she realised that she was losing her link to the past. And so, in 2004, Benjamin visited Baghdad for the first time, searching for her family's history amongst the remains of its once vital Jewish community, the roots of which predate the birth of Islam by a t...

For the first time, the true story behind one of the most brutal, tyrannical and dictatorial leaders of modern timesSince becoming President of Iraq in 1979, Saddam Hussein has systematically terrorised a nation, yet little is really known of the inner circle of his regime. Con Coughlin, using brilliant research, eyewitness accounts and information from the inner-circle of Hussein's advisors, examines the nature and execution of his tyranny as well as explaining Saddam's rise to power and contin...

The Israeli government was persuaded at the last minute not to enter the Gulf War when they were told that it was the SAS who were hunting for Scud missiles and disrupting Iraqi communications. The SAS forces inside Iraq comprised two half-squadrons (30 men each with vehicles) and three much smaller foot patrols, one of which had the call sign, "Bravo Two Zero". Corporal Terence Clayton, known as "Yorky", was a member of one of the half-squadrons. His group played a crucial role by destroying mi...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015Emma Sky was working for the British Council during the invasion of Iraq, when the ad went around calling for volunteers. Appalled at what she saw as a wrongful war, she signed up, expecting to be gone for months. Instead, her time in Iraq spanned a decade, and became a personal odyssey so unlikely that it could be a work of fiction. Quickly made civilian representative of the CPA in Kirkuk, and then political advi...

A New York Times bestseller! This reference shows how to understand the history and tactics of the global terror group ISIS and how to use that knowledge to defeat it. ISIS the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran and counter-terrorism expert Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Hack America and the forthcoming Hacking ISIS,...

In Across Cultures and Empires author Mahir Ibrahimov invites the reader to share his incredible journey through the world-shaking geopolitical transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This fast-paced narrative based upon the author's experience serving in the Soviet army as an Azeri minority; working for the Soviet Communist Party and experiencing disillusionment with communism; watching the fall of the Soviet Union; living through the abortive coup against Gorbac...

The city of Ur-now modern Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq, also called Ur of the Chaldees in the Bible-was one of the most important Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia during the Early Dynastic Period in the first half of the third millennium BCE. The city is known for its impressive wealth and artistic achievements, evidenced by the richly decorated objects found in the so-called Royal Cemetery, which was excavated by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until 1934. Ur...

Ottoman Turkey's First World War alliance with Germany provoked the first British invasion of Mesopotamia (Iraq), from India, in November 1914. A year later, General Townshend had to withdraw from Ctesiphon to Kut al-'Amarah, there to be besieged. Premature attempts were vainly made with great bloodshed to relieve him (including one involving bribery by T.E.Lawrence) until, after the longest ever imperial siege, more than a third of the garrison became casualties during a forced march to an exil...