Iraq History

An American officer presents an invaluable handbook for dealing with cultural issues in the Middle East during military operations....

Unbreakable Bonds tells 10 touching stories of mothers who spent years aiding the recoveries of their children, U.S. soldiers and marines who suffered severe injuries during the War on Terror. The survival of these wounded warriors is a testament not only to the extraordinary efforts of military medical personnel and their own inner fortitude but also to their mothers.

AK47s, masked thugs, and brutal urgency erupt from Roy Hallums' account of his abduction in Iraq, shredding through those frequently sterile cable news reports revealing that another "American contractor is being held hostage...". Hallums was the everyman behind that report⁠—a 56-year-old retired Naval commander working as a food supply contractor in Baghdad's high-end Mansour District. His abduction was transacted in a matter of minutes, amidst a hail of gunfire and a handful of casualties.

As an embedded journalist in Iraq, North got a soldier's-eye view, often while under fire, of what the mainstream media failed to report. A decorated combat veteran, North watched Operation Iraqi Freedom with trained eyes unmatched by other journalists. What he witnessed compelled him to challenge post-war critics of the operation for their uninformed and deceptive views.

Even now, after more than 15 years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper.

Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the "burn pits" where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.

In June 2005, four U.S. Navy SEALs left their base in Afghanistan for the Pakistani border. Their mission was to capture or kill a notorious al Qaeda leader. Less then 24 hours later, only one of those SEALs remained alive. This is the story of how team leader Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of Operation Redwing, and the desperate battle that led to the largest loss of life in Navy SEAL history.

Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the frustrations and resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and tells us what the Islamic doctrine of jihad has meant at different times in history.

This is the bizarre tale of 12 young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader - Saddam Hussein - in the months leading to his execution. Living alongside and caring for their "high-value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.

From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he'd long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

The Sumerians settled in the area known as Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, around 5,000 years ago. They produced many fundamental changes to the way in which human societies developed - these were the first city-builders, the first people to use wheeled vehicles, the first methodical astronomers, and the first people to develop a sophisticated written language. The Sumerians also produced art, music, and literature as well as created some of the first professional soldiers the world had ever seen.

Cowboys Over Iraq tells the amazing story of leadership, innovation, initiative, and a brotherhood that was forged in the crucible of combat during the invasion of Iraq.

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, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider's view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.

By official accounts, the Navy SEALs of Alpha platoon returned as heroes after their 2017 deployment to Mosul, following a vicious, bloody, and successful campaign to drive ISIS from the city. But within the platoon a different war raged. Even as Alpha’s chief, Eddie Gallagher, was being honored by the Navy for his leadership, several of his men were preparing to report him for war crimes, alleging that he’d stabbed a prisoner in cold blood and taken lethal sniper shots at unarmed civilians.

Walk in my Combat Boots is a powerful collection crafted from hundreds of original interviews by James Patterson, the world’s number one best-selling writer, and First Sergeant US Army (Ret.) Matt Eversmann, part of the Ranger unit portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down.

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers, and outraged the Bush Administration, with his stories in The New Yorker magazine, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from that clear morning in September to a divisive and dirty war in Iraq?

From Afghanistan's Hindu Kush peaks and sunbaked Helmand Valley to Baghdad, Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq, American snipers have braved heart-pounding situations to hit their human targets dead-on. Few military feats stir the imagination like the image of a pair of riflemen waiting quietly in a building, a bomb crater, or a mountain pass for a Taliban or Al Qaeda fighter to walk into their crosshairs. Sniper presents real-life tales from the military's frontline snipers---their hits and their misses, the anguish of loss, and the anxiety of the first kill.

The explosive narrative of the life, captivity, and trial of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who was abducted by the Taliban and whose story has served as a symbol for America's foundering war in Afghanistan.

The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and knew from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God."

They landed in a dust storm so thick the pilot used dead reckoning and a guess to find the ground. Welcomed by a band of heavily armed militiamen, they climbed a mountain on horseback to meet the most ferocious warlord in Asia. They plotted a war of nineteenth-century maneuvers against a twenty-first-century foe. They trekked through minefields, sometimes past the mangled bodies of local tribesmen who'd shared food with them hours before. The men they helped called them brothers. Hollywood called them the Horse Soldiers. They called themselves Green Berets—Special Forces ODA 595.