This is a Marine infantryman's combat memoir from the Invasion of Iraq to the Battle of Fallujah. It chronicles firsthand accounts of war while serving with the most combat-deployed Marine Corps battalion of the Iraq War, the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Initially trained as an infantry platoon radio operator and then as a team leader with a scout/sniper platoon, Brian Van Gorden portrays the battles that took place in a complex war and the hardships experienced from repeated combat deployments.

An authoritative military history of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Operation Iraqi Freedom, describing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the siege and fall of Baghdad, and the nation-building mission that followed. In 21 Days to Baghdad, historian Dr. Heather Stur describes the commitment of the division to Kuwait, the invasion of Iraq and the three weeks of violent desert conflicts on the way to Baghdad before the siege and battle for the city itself, and the “thunder runs” that saw its fall to U.S. forces. She then details the complex security mission that required the soldiers and their commanders to convince Iraqi citizens that the U.S. was there to help them, while at the same time they continued fighting Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard, paramilitary forces, and terrorists. This new history is based on exclusive, extensive interviews with General Buford “Buff” Blount, the U.S. Army two-star general who led the 3rd Infantry Division. His years of experience in the Middle East led him to question the recall of his division from Iraq at the end of 2003 and its replacement by a less experienced unit. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not believe that peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance were worthwhile uses of a conventional combat force like the 3rd Infantry Division. The division had destroyed Hussein's government. Mission accomplished, or so Bush and Rumsfeld thought. 21 Days to Baghdad illustrates the long reach of the U.S. military, the limitations of nation building in the wake of war, and the tensions between policymakers in Washington, DC, and troops on the ground over the purpose and conduct of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

One of the most celebrated units in the military for more than a century, by 1990, New York City's Fighting 69th Infantry Regiment of the Army National Guard was scarcely fit for duty. Its equipment was derelict, its discipline nonexistent, many of its leaders inept, and its ranks filled with kids barely out of high school who had little intention of serving their country for any longer than it took to get their paycheck, college credit, or job training. Then came the attacks of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. In The Fighting 69th, Sean Michael Flynn, himself a member of the unit, chronicles the extraordinary transformation of this band of amateur soldiers into a battle-hardened troop at one of the most lethal sites of war. Watch a Video

Thieves of Baghdad is a riveting account of Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and his team's extraordinary efforts to recover over 5,000 priceless antiquities stolen from the Iraqi National Museum after the fall of Baghdad. A mixture of police procedural, treasure hunt, war-time thriller, and cold-eyed assessment of the international black market in stolen art, Thieves of Baghdad also explores the soul of a truly remarkable man: a soldier, a father, and a passionate, dedicated scholar.

A no-holds-barred account from the tip of the Army s spear

This book provides data on fatalities, refugees and separated people for all major armed conflicts in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, and Latin America in 2015, alongside in-depth analysis of their political, military and humanitarian dimensions.

History comes alive in this nonfiction graphic novel! Readers will follow along as the Iraq War is detailed, from its genesis in Middle Eastern history to the discovery of its vast oil fields to the rise to power of Saddam Hussein. Follow the action from the 1991 Persian Gulf War to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, to the beginning in 2003 of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Battles for Fallujah are examined, from the school protest that ended in violence, to the deaths of four military contractors, to the final push to secure the city from insurgents. Table of contents, maps, biographies of key players, war statistics, and a glossary and index are included. Aligned to Common Core standards and correlated to state standards. Graphic Planet is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq—The Gamble is the next news breaking installment Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began. Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist. The Gamble offers news-breaking account, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates. For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.”

‘Iraq, the land of Hamurabi and Harun al-Rashid, has played a long and unique role in the history of human civilization. The oldest civilization known to humankind evolved on the shores of its twin rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The great cities of antiquity—Uruk, Ur, Akkad, Babylon, al-Basra, Mawsil, and Baghdad—were major centers of high culture and political power for much of the course of human history. This updated edition offers new and expanded coverage of a broad range of political, economic, security, cultural, and religious topics, including the emergence of a sustained protest movement for reform, the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and the Kurdish independence referendum. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Iraq contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Iraq.