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...
Ur in the Twenty-First Century CE (Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, #62)
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...
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...
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...
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,...