A first-hand chronicle of the arraignment of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, offering never before released accounts of the legal proceedings.
It took just three weeks for the second Gulf War to shake the world. Despite public protest and months of international negotiations, the bombs fell on Baghdad. Now, we can see the full picture. Guardian journalists - some of them in the heat of battle, some of them at a more reflective distance around the world - have assembled the story of the most controversial war of modern times. Launched by the mightiest military force on the earth to topple Saddam Hussein, the devastating attack on Iraq b...
Praise for the author's A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths: 'Eminently sane, highly informative'PAUL CARTLEDGE, BBC History magazineIn 2022 it will be 2,500 years since the final defeat of the invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes. This astonishing clash between East and West still has resonances in modern history, and has left us with tales of heroic resistance in the face of seemingly hopeless odds. Kershaw makes use of recent archaeological and geological discoveries in this thrilling a...
The long counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have made two facts abundantly clear about military contractors: 1) The U.S. Army has become dependent upon them; and, 2) They frequently create problems for, and sometimes actually interfere with, accomplishing the mission. In order to free up Soldiers for their core task of fighting and winning the nation's wars, the U.S. Government began in the 1980s to hire private companies to provide services previously handled by the military it...
This book initiates the reader into the study of Akkadian literature from ancient Babylonia and Assyria. With this one relatively short volume, the novice reader will develop the literary competence necessary to read and interpret Akkadian texts in translation and will gain a broad familiarity with the major genres and compositions in the language. The first part of the book presents introductory discussions of major critical issues, organized under four key rubrics: tablets, scribes, compositi...
Law and (Dis)Order in the Ancient Near East (Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, #59)
Mesopotamia is often considered to be the birthplace of law codes. In recognition of this fact and motivated by the perennial interest in the topic among Assyriologists, the 59th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale was organized in Ghent in 2013 around the theme “Law and (Dis)Order in the Ancient Near East.” Based on papers delivered at that meeting, this volume contains twenty-six essays that focus on archaeological, philological, and historical topics related to order and chaos in the Anci...
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East Editor, has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present.In The Making of the Modern Middle East - in part based on his acclaimed podcast, 'Our Man in the Middle East' - Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked...
The Mehdi Army militia was a towering force in Iraq during the early years of the post-Saddam era. As an aggressive opponent of foreign occupation and one of the principal antagonists in Iraq's brutal sectarian civil war, the militia was central to the violence that ravaged the country and a pivotal political actor. Growing rapidly in size and strength, and controlling entire districts of Baghdad and broad swathes of southern and central Iraq, the Mehdi Army seemed poised to become a Hezbollah-l...
Trunk Monkeys: The Life of a Contract Soldier in Iraq tells the true story of operators from a private military contractor working in Iraq shortly after the Gulf War. From the perspective of grizzled veteran Lewis Steiner who had left the British Army to join the gold rush in the living hell that was war-torn Iraq, Steiner grew disillusioned about the declining situation in the country as he believed that the joint US and UK invasion had made things far worse. This fascinating and often extremel...
Over ninety years since their absorption into the modern Iraqi state, the Kurdish people of Iraq still remain an apparent anomaly in the modern world - a nation without a state. In 'The Kurds of Iraq', Mahir Aziz explores this incongruity, and asks the pertinent questions, who are the Kurds today? What is their relationship to the Iraqi state? How do they perceive themselves and their prospective political future? And in what way are they crucial for the stability of the Iraqi state? In the w...
