Middle East War

Born to Palestinian refugees, Kassem Eid grew up in the small town of Moadamiya on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus. The streets that he and his many siblings played on were perfumed with jasmine. A precocious child, he excelled at school and had a natural gift for languages. But it didn't take long for Kassem to realise that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal government regime.

The United Nations is one of the most famous bodies in the world, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, might be equally notorious. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson’s pet project was controversial from nearly the minute it was conceived. At the end of World War I, Wilson's pleas at the Paris Peace Conference relied on his Fourteen Points, which included the establishment of a League of Nations, but while his points were mostly popular amongst Americans and Europeans alike, leaders at the Peace Conference largely discarded them and favored different approaches.

On March 21, 1968, Yasir Arafat and his guerrillas made the fateful decision to break with conventional guerrilla tactics, choosing to stand and fight an Israeli attack on the al-Karama refugee camp in Jordan. They suffered terrible casualties, but they won a stunning symbolic victory that transformed Arafat into an Arab hero and allowed him to launch a worldwide campaign, one that would reshape Cold War diplomacy and revolutionary movements everywhere. In The Global Offensive, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin offers new insights into the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Israel Defense Force Brigadier General Gal Hirsch has taken part in all of Israel's military confrontations since 1982, leaving a unique signature on a wide scope of strategic thinking owing to his deep understanding of operational art and military planning. In 2009, Hirschs autobiographical book in Hebrew, War Story, Love Story, was published and instantly appeared on the Israeli best seller list where it stayed for many months. The description of his own personal journey offers deep, open-minded, and critical insights.

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny, Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country.

On August 1, 1990, Flight 149 was scheduled for its routine London-to-Kuala Lumpur run. But when the plane, carrying 385 passengers and crew, landed at a Kuwait airport to refuel that day, it was surrounded by Iraqi tanks and about to be bombed by fighter jets. The passengers and crew were kept as hostages and suffered brutal treatment including violent attacks, sexual assaults, and mock executions.

In 1948, Stan Andrews left a comfortable postwar life in Los Angeles to travel to the war-torn Middle East, where a four-front Arab invasion threatened to destroy the newly-declared State of Israel. There he joined the Israeli Air Force and became one of its first fighter pilots. Andrews was an unexpected volunteer for the fight for a Jewish state. He had previously been aloof from the struggle for Jewish independence but found himself so roused by the anti-Semitism of 1940s America that he decided to go to Israel and risk everything.

From the preaching of the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the loss of the last crusader outpost in the Levant in 1302-03, and from the taking of Jerusalem from the Fatimids in 1099 to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, Crusaders tells a tale soaked in Islamic, Christian and Jewish blood, peopled by extraordinary characters, and characterised by both low ambition and high principle.

Most violent jihadi movements in the 20th century focused on removing corrupt, repressive secular regimes throughout the Muslim world. But following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a new form of jihadism emerged - global jihad - turning to the international arena as the primary locus of ideology and action. With this book, Glenn E. Robinson develops a compelling and provocative argument about this violent political movement's evolution.

The Sword of Freedom has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

On August 4, 2020, a huge explosion in the heart of Beirut killed hundreds of people – it is the apocalypse of a sequence of events that have led to Lebanon’s unprecedented collapse. Journalist Dalal Mawad has interviewed tens of Lebanese and foreign women - victims of the explosion, and those stuck in Lebanon - and weaves an extraordinary story of survival, corruption and impunity.

This New York Times best-seller delivers the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War, the rise of militant Islam, and how a colorful congressman from Texas conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the most successful covert operation in CIA history.

Images of U.S. Marines assaulting Pacific beaches in World War II have stereotyped the service's roles and personnel for more than 50 years. This frank firsthand account of Marines sweeping over sands of a different sort in fast armored vehicles retires that popular legend and recasts the Corps as the modern, professional fighting force it was in Desert Storm. Battling a savage environment; an unknown enemy brandishing threats of nuclear, gas, and biological attacks; and a host of technological and tactical snafus, Alpha Company of the 1st Light Armored Infantry Battalion pushed forward at the "tip of the spear".

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, First Sergeant Daniel Hendrex was dispatched along with his unit, Dragon Company, to Husaybah, a small town bordering Syria in the Sunni-dominated Al Anbar province of Iraq. It was at this checkpoint, amidst relentless attacks, that Daniel and his men found the most effective ally of the war effort in the most unlikely of sources.

The No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling modern classic: A Bravo Two Zero for the Second Gulf War. They were branded as cowards and accused of being the British Special Forces Squadron that ran away from the Iraqis. But nothing could be further from the truth. Ten years on, the story of these sixty men can finally be told. In March 2003 M Squadron - an SBS unit with SAS embeds - was sent 1,000 kilometres behind enemy lines on a true mission impossible, to take the surrender of the 100,000-strong Iraqi Army 5th Corps.

It is the year 1915, and the British and Ottoman Empires clash in a deadly struggle in the Middle East. Tasked with keeping the Ottomans out of Suez Canal, Major Andrew Selkirk discovers that his real assignment is to retrieve a Bengali spy working for those who vow to see British rule out of India. After landing on the west coast of Palestine, Selkirk discovers the Ottomans have taken the spy captive. Even more troubling are the plans by Ottomans and Germans to draw Afghanistan and Persia into the war against Great Britain.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, two of bin Laden’s key lieutenants: the masterminds behind the attacks of September 11. Based on the only interview these masterminds of terror ever gave to the media as well as extensive follow-up research, Capture or Kill may be the closest we will get to the full inside story of the plot.

The battle to defeat ISIS was an unremittingly brutal and dystopian struggle, a multi-sided war of gritty local commandos and militias. Mike Giglio takes listeners to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war. At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world.

Determined to offer an unfiltered version of events, the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid was neither embedded with soldiers nor briefed by politicians. Because he is fluent in Arabic, Shadid, an Arab-American born and raised in Oklahoma, was able to actually disappear into the divided, dangerous worlds of Iraq. Day by day, as American dreams clashed with Arab notions of justice, he pieced together the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the terrible dislocations and tragedies of war.

Faleeha Hassan became intimately acquainted with loss and fear while growing up in Najaf, Iraq. Now, in a deeply personal account of her life, she remembers those she has loved and lost.