Book Detail:
Author: James Verini
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652483
Size: 65.96 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Release Date: 2019-09-17
Category: History
Language: en
View: 3954
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF They Will Have To Die Now Mosul And The Fall Of The Caliphate eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. "They Will Have to Die Now is the story of what happened after most Americans stopped paying attention to Iraq…It will take its place among the very best war writing of the past two decades." —George Packer, author of Our Man and The Assassins’ Gate James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis’ last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year, nor that it would become, in the words of the Pentagon, "the most significant urban combat since WWII." They Will Have to Die Now takes the reader into the heart of the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. We see unspeakable violence, improbable humanity, and occasional humor. We meet an Iraqi major fighting his way through the city with a bad leg; a general who taunts snipers; an American sergeant who removes his glass eye to unnerve his troops; a pair of Moslawi brothers who welcomed the Islamic State, believing, as so many Moslawis did, that it might improve their shattered lives. Verini also relates the rich history of Iraq, and of Mosul, one of the most beguiling cities in the Middle East.

---

Book Detail:
Author: James Verini
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786077493
Size: 11.75 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Release Date: 2019-10-03
Category: History
Language: en
View: 6512
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF They Will Have To Die Now eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. The battle is for a city. The war is for history. In autumn 2016, Iraqi forces began operations to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. Millennia-old, Mosul was a birthplace of Western culture but also infamous for its cruelty, from the Assyrians to Saddam Hussein. Through the eyes of soldiers and families and jihadis, award-winning reporter James Verini chronicles the combat that followed. Among the most devastating urban conflicts since World War II, the battle for Mosul was both archaic and modern. Troops and jihadis fought house by house, block by block, matching bullet for bullet, while co-ordinating their movements on WhatsApp and uploading execution videos. Verini describes how this viciously contested patch of earth came to represent a war for the soul of a country, for its history and its future.

---

Book Detail:
Author: James Verini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781786077486
Size: 55.70 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Release Date: 2019-10-03
Category:
Language: en
View: 5534
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF They Will Have To Die Now eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. The battle is for a city. The war is for history. In autumn 2016, Iraqi forces began operations to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. Millennia-old, Mosul was a birthplace of Western culture but also infamous for its cruelty, from the Assyrians to Saddam Hussein. Through the eyes of soldiers and families and jihadis, award-winning reporter James Verini chronicles the combat that followed. Among the most devastating urban conflicts since World War II, the battle for Mosul was both archaic and modern. Troops and jihadis fought house by house, block by block, matching bullet for bullet, while co-ordinating their movements on WhatsApp and uploading execution videos. Verini describes how this viciously contested patch of earth came to represent a war for the soul of a country, for its history and its future.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Ben Mckelvey
Publisher: Hachette Australia
ISBN: 0733645429
Size: 39.58 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Release Date: 2020-09-29
Category: Political Science
Language: en
View: 1420
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Mosul eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. From the best-selling author of The Commando and Born to Fight comes a fascinating investigation of modern warfare that combines methodical research and the fast-paced action of battle with the personal stories of the combatants on both sides of the line. Taking us from the suburbs of western Sydney and Australia's military army bases, to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a remarkable book that reveals the as-yet untold story of the battle for Mosul and the secret involvement of Australians on both sides of the war - both our Commandos and Australian ISIS fighters. Mosul details the rise of ISIS influence in Australia, the Iran and Australia allegiance to fight Daesh and shows what led up to the battle and the ramifications that are still being felt at home - by our soldiers and the victims of that war. Ben Mckelvey has extraordinary access to SOOCOMD/2COMMANDO units - the most decorated modern Australian fighting unit; ISOF - Iraq's premier fighters; Yazidis women who had been slaves of ISIS; returned Commandos and their devastated families, and explains how petty criminals in Western Sydney became some of our worst jihadists who took their families to Iraq to fight for ISIS. Focusing on the stories of key figures like 2 Commando's Ian Turner and one of Australia's most infamous Jihadist, Khaled Sharrouf, Mckelvey takes us the heart of this brutal battle and brings history to life in an honest, thoughtful and compelling examination of modern warfare. A must-read for anyone interested in modern military history.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Graeme Wood (Journalist)
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812988752
Size: 12.52 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Release Date: 2017
Category: POLITICAL SCIENCE
Language: en
View: 7553
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF The Way Of The Strangers eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. "The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Mike Giglio
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541742346
Size: 31.64 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Release Date: 2019-10-15
Category: History
Language: en
View: 970
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Shatter The Nations eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. Unflinching dispatches of an embedded war reporter covering ISIS and the unlikely alliance of forces who came together to defeat it. 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 readers 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. Giglio tells the story of the rise of the caliphate and the ramshackle coalition--aided by secretive Western troops and American airstrikes--that was assembled to break it down village by village, district by district. The story moves from the smugglers, traffickers, and jihadis working on the ISIS side to the victims of its zealous persecution and the local soldiers who died by the thousands to defeat it. Amid the battlefield drama, culminating in a climactic showdown in Mosul, is a dazzlingly human portrait of the destructive power of extremism, and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Timothy Brennan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714711
Size: 45.57 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Release Date: 2021-03-23
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Language: en
View: 980
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Places Of Mind eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The first comprehensive biography of the most influential, controversial, and celebrated Palestinian intellectual of the twentieth century As someone who studied under Edward Said and remained a friend until his death in 2003, Timothy Brennan had unprecedented access to his thesis adviser’s ideas and legacy. In this authoritative work, Said, the pioneer of postcolonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, eloquent advocate of literature’s dramatic effects on politics and civic life. Charting the intertwined routes of Said’s intellectual development, Places of Mind reveals him as a study in opposites: a cajoler and strategist, a New York intellectual with a foot in Beirut, an orchestra impresario in Weimar and Ramallah, a raconteur on national television, a Palestinian negotiator at the State Department, and an actor in films in which he played himself. Brennan traces the Arab influences on Said’s thinking along with his tutelage under Lebanese statesmen, off-beat modernist auteurs, and New York literati, as Said grew into a scholar whose influential writings changed the face of university life forever. With both intimidating brilliance and charm, Said melded these resources into a groundbreaking and influential countertradition of radical humanism, set against the backdrop of techno-scientific dominance and religious war. With unparalleled clarity, Said gave the humanities a new authority in the age of Reaganism, one that continues today. Drawing on the testimonies of family, friends, students, and antagonists alike, and aided by FBI files, unpublished writings, and Said's drafts of novels and personal letters, Places of Mind synthesizes Said’s intellectual breadth and influence into an unprecedented, intimate, and compelling portrait of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Andrew Hosken
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780749333
Size: 40.55 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Release Date: 2015-12-03
Category: Religion
Language: en
View: 7287
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Empire Of Fear eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. Tourists killed in Tunisia, Jihadi John targeted by drone strikes, carnage in Paris and hundreds of thousands of Syrians risking everything to reach Europe in an attempt to escape the violence. Islamic State’s reign of terror continues. Back in June 2014 Islamic State had launched an astonishing blitzkrieg which saw them seize control of an area in the Middle East the size of Britain. The news was soon filled with their relentless acts of savagery, yet nobody seemed to know who they were or where they’d come from. In this updated edition of his acclaimed book, BBC reporter Andrew Hosken delivers the inside story on Islamic State from their origins to the present day. Through extensive first-hand reporting, Hosken builds a comprehensive picture of IS, their brutal ideology and exterminationist methods. The result is equally compelling and horrifying.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Michael Weiss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1941393713
Size: 41.75 MB
Format: PDF
Release Date: 2015-01-29
Category: Political Science
Language: en
View: 2066
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Isis eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. A revelatory look inside the world's most dangerous terrorist group. Initially dismissed by US President Barack Obama, along with other fledgling terrorist groups, as a “jayvee squad” compared to al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has shocked the world by conquering massive territories in both countries and promising to create a vast new Muslim caliphate that observes the strict dictates of Sharia law. In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from. Political and military maneuvering by the United States, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have all fueled ISIS’s astonishing and explosive expansion. Drawing on original interviews with former US military officials and current ISIS fighters, the authors also reveal the internecine struggles within the movement itself, as well as ISIS’s bloody hatred of Shiite Muslims, which is generating another sectarian war in the region. Just like the one the US thought it had stopped in 2011 in Iraq. Past is prologue and America’s legacy in the Middle East is sowing a new generation of terror.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Ephraim Mattos
Publisher: Center Street
ISBN: 154608181X
Size: 28.15 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Release Date: 2018-10-23
Category: Political Science
Language: en
View: 1194
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF City Of Death eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. A frontline witness account of the deadly urban combat of the Battle of Mosul told by former Navy SEAL and frontline combat medic Ephraim Mattos. After leaving the US Navy SEAL teams in spring of 2017, Ephraim Mattos, age twenty-four, flew to Iraq to join a small group of volunteer humanitarians known as the Free Burma Rangers, who were working on the frontlines of the war on ISIS. Until being shot by ISIS on a suicidal rescue mission, Mattos witnessed unexplainable acts of courage and sacrifice by the Free Burma Rangers, who, while under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, assaulted across ISIS minefields, used themselves as human shields, and sprinted down ISIS-infested streets-all to retrieve wounded civilians. In City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul, Mattos recounts in vivid detail what he saw and felt while he and the other Free Burma Rangers evacuated the wounded, conducted rescue missions, and at times fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iraqi Army against ISIS. Filled with raw and emotional descriptions of what it's like to come face-to-face with death, this is the harrowing and uplifting true story of a small group of men who risked everything to save the lives of the Iraqi people and who followed the credence, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." As the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestselling American Sniper, Scott McEwen has teamed up with Mattos to help share an unforgettable tale of an American warrior turned humanitarian forced to fight his way into and out of a Hell on Earth created by ISIS.

---

Book Detail:
Author: William McCants
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250080908
Size: 25.71 MB
Format: PDF
Release Date: 2015-09-22
Category: History
Language: en
View: 4116
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF The Isis Apocalypse eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. A comprehensive history of ISIS based on insider accounts and secret communications few outsiders have seen

---

Book Detail:
Author: Dana J.H. Pittard
Publisher: Post Hill Press
ISBN: 1642930563
Size: 16.94 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Release Date: 2019-08-27
Category: History
Language: en
View: 1203
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Hunting The Caliphate eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. In this vivid first-person narrative, a Special Operations Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) and his commanding general give fascinating and detailed accounts of America’s fight against one of the most barbaric insurgencies the world has ever seen. In the summer of 2014, three years after America’s full troop withdrawal from the Iraq War, President Barack Obama authorized a small task force to push back into Baghdad. Their mission: Protect the Iraqi capital and U.S. embassy from a rapidly emerging terrorist threat. A plague of brutality, that would come to be known as ISIS, had created a foothold in northwest Iraq and northeast Syria. It had declared itself a Caliphate—an independent nation-state administered by an extreme and cruel form of Islamic law—and was spreading like a newly evolved virus. Soon, a massive and devastating U.S. military response had unfolded. Hear the ground truth on the senior military and political interactions that shaped America’s war against ISIS, a war unprecedented in both its methodology and its application of modern military technology. Enter the world of the Strike Cell, secretive operations centers where America’s greatest enemies are hunted and killed day and night. Plunge into the realm of the Special Operations JTAC, American warfighters with the highest enemy kill counts on the battlefield. And gain the wisdom of a cumulative half-century of military experience as Dana Pittard and Wes Bryant lay out the path to a sustained victory over ISIS. For more information about the book, visit www.huntingthecaliphate.com.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Richard Brookhiser
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541699122
Size: 52.12 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Release Date: 2019-11-05
Category: History
Language: en
View: 1201
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Give Me Liberty eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. An award-winning historian recounts the history of American liberty through the stories of thirteen essential documents Nationalism is inevitable: It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors and tells us who we are. But increasingly -- from the United States to India, from Russia to Burma -- nationalism is being invoked for unworthy ends: to disdain minorities or to support despots. As a result, nationalism has become to many a dirty word. In Give Me Liberty, award-winning historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser offers up a truer and more inspiring story of American nationalism as it has evolved over four hundred years. He examines America's history through thirteen documents that made the United States a new country in a new world: a free country. We are what we are because of them; we stay true to what we are by staying true to them. Americans have always sought liberty, asked for it, fought for it; every victory has been the fulfillment of old hopes and promises. This is our nationalism, and we should be proud of it.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Tayeb El-Hibri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107183243
Size: 71.80 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Release Date: 2021-04-22
Category: History
Language: en
View: 807
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF The Abbasid Caliphate eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. A history of the Abbasid Caliphate from its foundation in 750 and golden age under Harun al-Rashid to the conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, this study examines the Caliphate as an empire and an institution, and its imprint on the society and culture of classical Islamic civilization.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Donald Holbrook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190911174
Size: 57.66 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Release Date: 2018-01-15
Category: Political Science
Language: en
View: 6245
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Al Qaeda 2 0 eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. On 16 June 2011, three days before his sixtieth birthday, Ayman al-Zawahiri was declared the new leader of Al- Qaeda, replacing the fallen Osama bin Laden. The veteran Egyptian jihadist had little of his predecessor's charisma and enjoyed much less popularity, respect and celebrity. Yet, as scores of jihadi commanders from different organisations have succumbed to their enemies' missiles, bombs and bullets, Zawahiri has soldiered on. His tenure as Al-Qaeda's leader has been marked by some of its darkest and most challenging moments, which have threatened the viability and future of Al-Qaeda's central leadership. The gravest such development has been the emergence of Islamic State as a separate and rival jihadist entity. The best way to gauge Zawahiri's response to these threats is by studying the official statements and public communiqués that he has issued since taking the reins. This book provides the reader with professional translations of Zawahiri's key statements during his first five years as leader of Al-Qaeda. These official communications are introduced and contextualised to provide the reader with a comprehensive sourcebook, outlining the Al-Qaeda leadership's stance on the challenges to its existence since the death of bin Laden.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Ivor Prickett
Publisher: Steidl
ISBN: 9783958294936
Size: 13.18 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Release Date: 2019-03
Category: History
Language: en
View: 2444
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Ivor Prickett End Of The Caliphate eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. This book is the result of over a year's work in 2016 and 2017 photographing the military campaign to reclaim Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, from ISIS. Working exclusively for the New York Times, Irish-born photographer Ivor Prickett (born 1983) was often embedded within Iraqi special forces troops as he documented both the fighting and its toll on the civilian population and urban landscape. The operation lasted nearly nine months, resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and ruined vast tracts of the city. Involving some of the most brutal urban combat since World War II, the fall of Mosul was key to the downfall of the Islamic State: soon after, the remains of the so-called "Caliphate" quickly collapsed. Prickett focuses on the human struggles of conflict. Taken on the frontline, his pictures legitimately and compellingly record the experience of being "caught in the crossfire," whether as a soldier or noncombatant. He furthermore captures postwar reality while attempting to reconstruct the final weeks of combat: the devastated city, including abandoned corpses of ISIS fighters, and, months later, families searching for missing loved ones and civilians returning to reclaim their homes and lives.

---

Book Detail:
Author: James Simpson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781070931401
Size: 60.27 MB
Format: PDF, Docs
Release Date: 2019-06-04
Category:
Language: en
View: 2001
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF The Red Green Axis 2 0 eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. The Red-Green Axis is a collusion between the Democratic Party, American Communists, Socialists and other brands of "progressives", i.e., the Red, and the forces of the Islamic jihad, the Green-so named because the color green carries much symbolism in Islam, and most Muslim nations feature green in flags, emblems, and other identifiers. Its collective goal is to alter and undermine our national character, traditions, and laws so much that it can overthrow our Constitutional republican form of government without firing a shot. The alliance allows each to take advantage of the tactics, strategies, and cultural features of the other, and mobilizes a vastly larger number of people. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) now supports Black Lives Matter (BLM) and participates in its protests. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) also work with BLM, CAIR, and open borders groups.Immigration is one of the Red-Green Axis's most effective tools. Under the banner of "compassion," it advocates for open borders and endless waves of refugees, asylum seekers, and other third-world immigrants to stress government budgets at all levels, overburden communities with medical, language, crime, welfare, and other burdens, while rhetorically and sometimes physically attacking those who object, calling opponents "racists," "bigots," "xenophobes," and the latest innovation, "Islamophobes."This second edition of the Red-Green Axis delves deeply into the immigration/refugee resettlement issue to catalog not only the breadth and depth of the program and its supporters, but to expose the massive problems and cultural changes that have been created, I believe deliberately, as the key element in the Axis agenda to erase America as we know it.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Fawaz A. Gerges
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691211922
Size: 63.51 MB
Format: PDF, Docs
Release Date: 2021-11-02
Category: Political Science
Language: en
View: 6777
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Isis eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. An authoritative introduction to ISIS—now expanded and revised to bring events up to the present The Islamic State stunned the world with its savagery, destructiveness, and military and recruiting successes. However, its most striking and distinctive characteristic was its capacity to build governing institutions and a theologically grounded national identity. What explains the rise of ISIS and the caliphate, and what does it portend for the future of the Middle East? In this book, one of the world’s leading authorities on political Islam and jihadism sheds new light on these questions. Moving beyond journalistic accounts, Fawaz Gerges provides a clear and compelling explanation of the deeper conditions that fuel ISIS. This new edition brings the story of ISIS to the present, covering key events—from the military defeat of its territorial state to the death of its leader al-Baghdadi—and analyzing how the ongoing Syrian, Iraqi, and Saudi-Iranian conflict could lead to ISIS’s revival.

---

Book Detail:
Author: James Reston, Jr.
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030743012X
Size: 12.46 MB
Format: PDF
Release Date: 2007-12-18
Category: History
Language: en
View: 5125
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF Warriors Of God eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. Acclaimed author James Reston, Jr.'s Warriors of God is the rich and engaging account of the Third Crusade (1187-1192), a conflict that would shape world history for centuries and which can still be felt in the Middle East and throughout the world today. James Reston, Jr. offers a gripping narrative of the epic battle that left Jerusalem in Muslim hands until the twentieth century, bringing an objective perspective to the gallantry, greed, and religious fervor that fueled the bloody clash between Christians and Muslims. As he recounts this rousing story, Reston brings to life the two legendary figures who led their armies against each other. He offers compelling portraits of Saladin, the wise and highly cultured leader who created a united empire, and Richard the Lionheart, the romantic personification of chivalry who emerges here in his full complexity and contradictions. From its riveting scenes of blood-soaked battles to its pageant of fascinating, larger-than-life characters, Warriors of God is essential history, history that helps us understand today's world.

---

Book Detail:
Author: Patrick Cockburn
Publisher: Leftword Books
ISBN: 9789380118253
Size: 58.87 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Release Date: 2020
Category: Fiction
Language: en
View: 4069
Status: Available

Get Book
Book Description
Download PDF The Rise Of Islamic State eBook. You can read online on your kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad. Though capable of staging spectacular attacks like 9/11, jihadist organizations were not a significant force on the ground when they first became notorious in the shape of al-Qa'ida at the turn of century. //Today, that's changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding. They now control a geographical territory greater in size than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands in the north and west of Iraq through a broad swath of north-east Syria. On the back of their capture of Mosul and much of northern Iraq in June 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared the head of a new caliphate that demands the allegiance of all Muslims. The secular, democratic politics that were supposedly at the fore of the Arab Spring have been buried by the return of the jihadis writing with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West's greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.//Patrick Cockburn is currently a Middle East correspondent for the Independent. His book on Iraq's recent history, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Awards. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. He was named Foreign Commentator of the Year by the Comment Awards in 2013.

---