Middle East Politics

As a 23-year veteran of the United States Navy SEAL Teams, Ryan Zinke received two Bronze Stars for battle valor and eventually rose to command the elite members of SEAL Team Six. During his career Zinke trained and commanded many of the men who would one day run the covert operations to hunt down Osama bin Laden and save Captain Phillips ( Maersk Alabama). He also served as mentor to now famous SEALs Marcus Luttrell ( Lone Survivor) and Chris Kyle ( American Sniper).

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States.

The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was?

The definitive biography of Henry Kissinger - at least for those who neither revere nor revile him.

Pierre Tallet's discovery of the Red Sea Scrolls—the world's oldest surviving written documents—in 2013 was one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Egyptology. These papyri, written some 4,600 years ago, and combined with Mark Lehner's research, changed what we thought we knew about the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Here, for the first time, the world-renowned Egyptologists Tallet and Lehner give us the definitive account of this discovery and explore how the building of the pyramids helped create a unified state, propelling Egyptian civilization forward.

Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society.

On a beautiful sunny day in March 1979, as thousands of Egyptians awaited in anticipation, a plane landed in Cairo. Moments later, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat stepped out, welcomed by thunderous cheers from an overjoyed crowd. He had just returned to his country from Washington D.C., where five days earlier he had signed a historic treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, bringing an end to three decades of war and hostilities between Israelis and Egyptians.

Since its publication in 2003, the first edition of Black Garden has become the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, were pulled into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, spell the end the Soviet Union, and plunge a region of great strategic importance into a decade of turmoil. This important volume is both a careful reconstruction of the history of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and on-the-spot reporting of the convoluted aftermath.

What is at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What does justice demand of us in this conflict? This audiobook clarifies an intimidatingly complex issue - and upends conventional views about America’s stake in it. In this audiobook, Elan Journo explains the essential nature of the conflict and what has fueled it for so long. What justice demands, he shows, is that we evaluate both adversaries - and America's approach to the conflict - according to a universal moral ideal: individual liberty.

The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets Without Honor tells the story of the attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict.

This is an ambitious, meticulous examination of how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11. Peter Dale Scott, whose previous books have investigated CIA involvement in southeast Asia, the drug wars, and the Kennedy assassination, here probes how the policies of presidents since Nixon have augmented the tangled bases for the 2001 terrorist attack.

Is it really possible to love one's enemies? That's the question that sparked a fascinating and, at times, terrifying journey into the heart of the Middle East during the summer of 2008. It was a trip that began in Egypt, passed beneath the steel-and-glass high-rises of Saudi Arabia, then wound through the bullet-pocked alleyways of Beirut and dusty streets of Damascus, before ending at the cradle of the world's three major religions: Jerusalem.

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire's history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470-1520).

As the world's attention traces the reluctant social advances in the Middle East, Princess Sultana and her female friends and family have stepped forward to rescue young women in the region who are cruelly mistreated by their husbands, their fathers, and the brutish ISIS soldiers who kidnap them. But inside the Princess' lavish Saudi Arabian palace, sparks of anger and bolts of fear crackle because of the secrets kept to forward her efforts to help women and children.

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.

In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth, and ancient monasteries built over 1,000 years ago. Shehadeh’s love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography.

Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About”. Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran". I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined. - From Things I Have Been Silent About.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

In 1956 President Nasser of Egypt moved to take possession of the Suez Canal, thereby bringing the Middle East to the brink of war. The British and the French, who operated the canal, joined with Israel in a plan to retake it by force. Despite the special relationship between England and America, Dwight Eisenhower intervened to stop the invasion.