There are no winners in war… Mosul, Iraq, 2016: Once ISIL's greatest conquest, the city is fast becoming a giant graveyard. As Western attacks devastate the city, even senior officers like Karl realise defeat is inevitable, while traumatised families find themselves displaced, looking for somewhere safe to call home. On Karl’s instructions, two jihadists travel across the EU, planning to bring terror to the West. German police officer Max Kellerman is on their trail, but can he find them in time to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack? Meanwhile, the Al-Douri family flee Mosul in search of peace and safety in Western Europe. As refugees they face an impossible journey fraught with danger, but will they ever reach the safety they dream of? The Mogul Legacy is a story about love, sacrifice and the horrors of war, that combines detailed factual events with a gripping multi-stranded plot and culminates with a surprise finale…

An account of the forces-historical, religious, ethnic, and political-that produced Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2019 “It’s a small miracle that a writer as good as James Verini witnessed the battle of Mosul.… It will take its place among the very best war writing of the past two decades.” —George Packer 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. This “urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage” (Patrick Radden Keefe) takes the reader into the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time.

Almost fifty years after Britain and France left the Middle East, the toxic legacies of their rule continue to fester. To make sense of today's conflicts and crises, we need to grasp how Western imperialism shaped the region and its destiny in the half-century between 1917 and 1967. Roger Hardy unearths an imperial history stretching from North Africa to southern Arabia that sowed the seeds of future conflict and poisoned relations between the Middle East and the West. Drawing on a rich cast of eye-witnesses - ranging from nationalists and colonial administrators to soldiers, spies, and courtesans - The Poisoned Well brings to life the making of the modern Middle East, highlighting the great dramas of decolonisation such as the end of the Palestine mandate, the Suez crisis, the Algerian war of independence, and the retreat from Aden. Concise and beautifully written, The Poisoned Well offers a thought-provoking and insightful story of the colonial legacy in the Middle East.

This book offers a new understanding of the nature of power-seeking insurgent groups by empirically examining the use of violence by Hamas in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Though Hamas has learned to ride the tides of popular support, it remains suspended between its quest to achieve the values of its ardent supporters (reclamation of land through force) and the desire to grow popular support. This tension is reflected in how and when the group exercises violent resistance. The theoretical framework applied in this volume provides a simple construct to understand the dynamics that result in use and non-use of violence under changing environmental conditions by Hamas, but could be applied more broadly to other power-seeking insurgent groups, including ISIL. The book weaves together the dynamics between violent actions and internal and external influences on Hamas, including: expressed values of the group, Palestinian popular support measures, leaders’ personalities and innovation (weapons and tactics), Israeli influence and targeted killings, peace processes and conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. With newly assembled datasets on Hamas’ violent acts and public statements, Israeli Targeted Killings, historical measures of popular support and extensive field interviews, the book offers a fresh perspective on insurgent group violence by demonstrating under what conditions the group exercises violence or refrains from doing so. This book will be of much interest to both policy makers and students of the Arab-Israeli conflict, political violence, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and international relations in general.

Drawing on medieval Arabic sources and earlier scholarship, this book is a study of the life and work of Ibn D?niy?l (d. 1310). It also presents the first full English translation of his shadow play "The Phantom.”

"Brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I’ve ever encountered." —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried An award-winning poet and former infantry team leader in Iraq, Brian Turner combines his devastating recollections as “Sergeant Turner” with his visions of the experiences of generations of warriors in his family—and even those of the enemy—in a work of profound understanding and shocking beauty.

Patchwork in times of plurality encompasses the multitude of actions as a revealing symbol of ethos, actors, organisms, and manifestations of preservation and dialogue frontiers. This plural metaphor, almost like a patchwork, aggregates and yet segregates, conforms, but disfigures, and boosts the meanings which represent this new field that international relations have been recently crossing. Just like the mirror metaphor - that reflects everything to all and, sometimes, intervenes in distortions - the patchwork analogy allowed the book to take responsibility for the disclosure of preservation actions on a global scale. The book has a pioneering role insofar since it is the only publication with such characteristics, concerns, and coverage. The work studies the interconnection between cultural properties and international relations by understanding them as a mosaic before the bridges that intertwine people and borders. The main goal of this work is to illustrate in what way intergovernmental relations have been privileging heritage and culture as acting fields for its broader needs. Therefore, the book addresses topics related to the international agenda, focusing on its less debated themes. Two examples of these undervalued matters are the link between actors, preservationist actions, and the universe of world cultural heritage. The book also pursuits a critical dialogue between interdisciplinary fields that narrow heritage frontiers in search to contribute with a spectrum of academic perspectives and (inter)national study cases. To serve distinct economic, social, or political purposes, institutionalized heritage (embodied by different values) becomes instrumentalized in a top-down direction. In a development frame, when we perceive culture as indispensable to human life, the past is transformed into exchange currency. Through the creation of alternative fields of action, usually in a bottom-up logic, the present builds new heritage connections. Digital heritage's preservation, dissemination, and appreciation have been representing these same nets.

Die Reihe Islamkundliche Untersuchungen wurde 1969 im Klaus Schwarz Verlag begründet und hat sich zu einem der wichtigsten Publikationsorgane der Islamwissenschaft in Deutschland entwickelt. Die über 350 Bände widmen sich der Geschichte, Kultur und den Gesellschaften Nordafrikas, des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens sowie Zentral-, Süd- und Südost-Asiens.