Iraq History

Ur was a considerable Sumerian city-state in old Mesopotamia, situated near modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar in the Dhi Qar Governorate in Southern Iraq. Ur was formerly a seaside city on the Persian Gulf, near the mouth of the Euphrates, but the shoreline has modified, and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometers (about 9.9 miles) from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq.

Eagerly anticipated in the wake of their national best seller Cobra II (“The superb, must-read military history of the invasion of Iraq”—Thomas L. Friedman), The Endgame is Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor’s most ambitious and news-breaking book to date. A peerless work...

In Dr. Robert Elliott’s Citizen Soldier: From the Land of Lincoln to Iraq and Back, listeners learn what it is like to say goodbye to a wife and three children and then travel across Iraq by convoy and helicopters. You’ll learn about the stressors, the dangers, and the risks taken and retaken.

During the early years of the Iraq War, the US Army was unable to translate initial combat success into strategic and political victory. Iraq plunged into a complex insurgency, and defeating this insurgency required beating highly adaptive foes. A competition between the hierarchical and vertically integrated Army and networked and horizontally integrated insurgents ensued. The latter could quickly adapt and conduct networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to fighting via prescriptive plans under a centralized command and control.

Chief Warrant Officer Robert Mills enlisted in the U.S. Army on 9/11/2001. Relive the day-to-day experiences with Robert just as he lived them. Robert's daily journal will give you a realistic view from his cockpit. His writings cover the entire spectrum, from the joys of simply receiving mail from home, living in harsh conditions, experiencing frequent enemy attacks, aircraft emergencies, and losing a fellow pilot to making the ultimate decision to pull the trigger to end one life in order to save another.

We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.

Jess enlisted in the Marines immediately after graduating from high school in 2001, and in 2004 she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps' first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq. Her platoon was tasked with recovering and processing the remains of fallen soldiers. With sensitivity and insight, Jess describes her job retrieving and examining the remains of fellow soldiers lost in combat in Iraq, and the psychological intricacy of coping with their fates, as well as her own.

Deep beneath the ancient city of Jerusalem lies a secret that knows no bounds, devastating enough to reach across time. History’s greatest spy story begins here. For a millennium, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount has been at the center of war and death. There’s never been a time when blood...

Over one million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past four years, but fewer than 500 from this group have earned a Silver Star, Navy Cross, Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or the Medal of Honor. Those who have been awarded these distinguished honors all demonstrated an extraordinary courage under fire in the worst of circumstances.

Ancient Mesopotamia history is defined by several key inventions that impacted the globe, including the concept of time, algebra, the wheel, sailboats, maps and writing. Another characteristic of Mesopotamia is the shifting succession of governing bodies from various regions and cities that seized power over a period of thousands of years.

In 2003, after serving five and a half years as a carpenter in a North Dakota National Guard engineer unit, Bronson Lemer was ready to leave the military behind. But six months short of completing his commitment to the army, Lemer was deployed on a yearlong tour of duty to Iraq. Leaving college life behind in the Midwest, he yearns for a lost love and quietly dreams of a future as an openly gay man outside the military.

The end of the Cold War promised a new era of international peace. But instead, violence has proliferated across the globe, not in the form of a superpower arms race or a clash of armies, but in bitter local conflicts marked by terrorism, insurgency, and guerrilla warfare. Former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey likened the post-Cold-War world to "a jungle full of snakes". The emergence of this new, potentially never-ending struggle has forced our military to reevaluate strategies or risk losing hearts, minds, and soldiers the world over.

The startling and controversial memoir of combat and betrayal, written by one of the most prominent members of the U.S. fighting forces in Iraq. A West Point graduate, a former star quarterback who carried Army to its first bowl victory, and a courageous warrior who had proven himself on the...

The United States intelligence establishment is a colossus. With stations in 170 countries, armed with cutting-edge surveillance gear, high-tech weapons, and fleets of armed and unarmed drone aircraft, it commands the most extensive and advanced intel force in history. But America's spy establishment still struggles to keep pace with a host of determined enemies around the world. In Intel Wars, leading espionage historian Matthew M. Aid delivers the inside stories of our decade-long struggle against terrorism.

Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so begins the journey, centered around a solemn mission, but, as in the first book, a protest against injustice and celebration of life, too, at once irreverent, funny, profane, and deeply moving.

They put a price on his head. They did everything they could to disrupt his mission. Finally, when an antitank mine tore off his right foot, the warriors of jihad in Iraq thought they had neutralized one of their most resourceful, determined foes.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were murdered under the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. Some four thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed. Betrayed again and again by the nations of the world, the Kurds were as decimated as any people in history. Then came the Kurdish Miracle, that combination of ancient wisdom and modern economic genius that is now making the Kurdish homeland one of the most prosperous places on earth.

War is hell....but sometimes it's also funny as hell.

Across Cultures and Empires is above all an immigrant's story. Mahir Ibrahimov's fluency in multiple languages offers the perspective of someone who found a way to successfully cross boundaries amid the fall of empire and the resulting cascade of conflicts, even as he provides the listener with insight into an era where mass migration has become a defining dynamic. In the course of telling his personal story and reflecting upon his experiences, Ibrahimov offers clear observations on the deep connections he has made about freedom and America's role in the world.

Everybody makes mistakes, but when an American president blunders, the results can be catastrophic. In an effort to put an end to Britain and France's policy of seizing American ships and sailors, Thomas Jefferson calls for an embargo. The result: 30,000 sailors put out of work; mercantile families bankrupted overnight; a nationwide economic depression; and the New England states, which depended heavily on international commerce, threaten to secede from the Union.All of these, and many more, incredible lapses in judgement are explained in this book.