Download or read book Iraqi Fighters written by Ahmad Sadik and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2008-07-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an exclusive insight into service history of 13 fighter jet types - from Vampires and Hunters to MiG-29s and Su-24s - that served with Royal Iraqi Air Force (RIrAF) and Iraqi Air Force (IrAF) between 1953 and 2003. Serious investigative research, including exclusive primary evidence gathered by both authors in- and outside Iraq, generated a level of detail and color of unmatched degree in any previous publications about any Arab air force. The result is a detailed history of RIrAF and IrAF markings, serial numbers and camouflage patterns, the in-depth history of each Iraqi fighter squadron, their equipment over the time as well as unit and various special insignias. Richly illustrated with photographs and artworks, the book provides details about a number of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons, many put to the ultimate test only by the Iraqi Air Force. A list of original names for air bases used by IrAF is included as well. An appendix lists the existing plastic scale model kits in 1/72, 1/48 and 1/32 scale as well as decals sheets in regards to Iraqi Air Force.
Download or read book Why We Lost written by Daniel P. Bolger and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A high-ranking general's gripping insider account of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it all went wrong. Over a thirty-five-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both theaters of the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in meetings with top-level military and civilian players, where strategy was made and managed. At the same time, he regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat actions, unusual for a general. Now, as a witness to all levels of military command, Bolger offers a unique assessment of these wars, from 9/11 to the final withdrawal from the region. Writing with hard-won experience and unflinching honesty, Bolger makes the firm case that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, we lost -- but we didn't have to. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets or theories. And, at the root of our failure, we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is a timely, forceful, and compulsively readable account of these wars from a fresh and authoritative perspective.
Download or read book The Fighters written by C. J. Chivers and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The harrowing account of US soldiers caught in America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that The New York Times calls “relentless...a classic of war reporting,” by Pulitzer Prize winner and former Marine C.J. Chivers. More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001, and C.J. Chivers reported on both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared. The Fighters is a “gripping, unforgettable” (The Boston Globe) portrait of modern warfare. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters is “a masterful work of atmospheric reporting, and it’s a book that will have every reader asking—with varying degrees of urgency or anger or despair—the final question Chivers himself asks: ‘How many lives had these wars wrecked?’” (Christian Science Monitor).
Download or read book From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists written by Vera Grigorʹevna Mironova and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, thousands of pro-democracy rebel groups spontaneously formed to fight the Assad regime. Years later, the revolution was unrecognizable as rebel opposition forces had merged into three major groups: Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al Sham, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Why did these three groups rapidly increase in size and military strength while others simply disappeared? What is it about their organizational structure and their Islamist ideology that helped group manage their fighters so successfully? With these questions at the forefront, this book examines the internal organization of armed groups and, in particular, their human resources. Analyzing the growth of these groups through the prism of a labor market theory, this book shows that extreme Islamist groups were able to attract fighters away from more moderate groups because they had better internal organization, took better care of fighters both physically and monetarily, experienced less internal corruption, and effectively used their Islamist ideology to control recruits. With unparalleled access and extensive ethnographic research drawn from her interviews and her year embedded with Iraqi Special Operation forces, Mironova delves deep into the ideological and practical nexus of some of the most radical groups in the Middle East. This book brings together more than 600 survey-interviews with local civilians and fighters on the frontline in Syria and a dataset of human resource policies from 40 armed groups; it is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants insight into the on the ground functioning of rebel organizations.
Download or read book Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars FY 2001 FY 2012 written by Amy Belasco and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Battle of An Nasiriyah written by Rod Andrew (Jr.) and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2009 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Iraqi Mirages written by Tom Cooper and published by Middle East@War. This book was released on 2018-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally envisaged and acquired as a 'pure' interceptor, before long the Mirage F.1 in Iraqi service proved a highly capable multi-role platform aircraft, and was widely deployed not only for ground attack but also anti-shipping purposes, as an aerial tanker, and for delivering long-range pin-point attacks.
Download or read book The Ragged Edge written by Michael Zacchea and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deployed to Iraq in March 2004 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, US Marine Michael Zacchea thought he had landed a plum assignment. His team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the US military. Quickly, he realized he was faced with a nearly impossible task. With just two weeks' training based on outdated and irrelevant materials, no language instruction, and few cultural tips for interacting with his battalion of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and others, Zacchea arrived at his base in Kirkush to learn his recruits would need beds, boots, uniforms, and equipment. His Iraqi officer counterparts spoke little English. He had little time to transform his troops—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—into a cohesive rifle battalion that would fight a new insurgency erupting across Iraq. In order to stand up a fighting battalion, Zacchea knew, he would have to understand his men. Unlike other combat Marines in Iraq at the time, he immersed himself in Iraq's culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even being inducted into one of its Sunni tribes. A constant source of both pride and frustration, the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion went on to fight bravely at the Battle of Fallujah against the forces that would eventually form ISIS. The Ragged Edge is Zacchea's deeply personal and powerful account of hopeful determination, of brotherhood and betrayal, and of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. It sheds light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents and terrorists, precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any other time in US history.
Download or read book Iraqi Air Force Reborn written by Arnaud Delalande and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iraqi Air Power Reborn provides the most authoritative account of the Iraqi air arms in the years following Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the space of over a decade since Harpia Publishing presented its groundbreaking and ever-popular Iraqi Fighters, the Iraqi Air Force has undergone an unprecedented transformation. Having been almost entirely decimated by coalition air strikes in 2003, and during the insurgency that followed, Baghdad has set about rebuilding its air power from scratch. This book summarizes the history of the Iraqi Air Force and its various incarnations until 2003 before detailing the efforts to establish a new-look Air Force, which began with training formations, before adding transport and reconnaissance squadrons, and finally attack and fighter squadrons - the latter now equipped with the Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon. Coverage also extends to Iraqi Army Aviation, and its various transport, special operations, armed reconnaissance and attack squadrons. Iraqi Army Aviation in particular has been blooded in the fighting that has plagued Iraq since the coalition invasion, and, using pilot testimonies and other sources, author Arnaud Delalande provides exhaustive coverage of successive campaigns waged by Iraqi air power against local and foreign insurgents, including the so-called Islamic State. As well as an overview of Iraq's air arsenal, therefore, this work also serves as a primer of the ongoing conflict within the country. A map of all current Iraqi air bases complements the comprehensive photographic coverage and a detailed order of battle is included, together with squadron patches. A full list is provided of aircraft serial numbers and attrition to all causes since 2004. Iraqi Air Power Reborn is one of the first books in an all-new format from Harpia Publishing. Those readers familiar with Harpia's previous titles will recognize the format, layout, and high-quality production standards. Compared to earlier Harpia titles, however, the new series are altogether more compact, running to a total of 80 pages, and enabling coverage of 'smaller' themes. Of course, these books also retain the now-familiar in-depth coverage, painstaking research and lavish illustrations of their 'bigger brothers'.
Download or read book Fallujah Awakens written by Bill Ardolino and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cradle of an insurgency that plunged Iraq into years of chaos and bloodshed, Fallujah conjures up images of the brutal house-to-house fighting that occurred during the 2004 U.S. invasion of the iconic city. But attacks in the area actually peaked two years later, when American and Iraqi government forces struggled with a reinvigorated insurgency and the prospect of premature withdrawal by U.S. forces. Fallujah Awakens tells the story of the remarkable turnaround that followed. Journalist Bill Ardolino explains how local tribal leaders and U.S. Marines forged a surprising alliance that helped secure the famous battleground. It is one of the few books to recount events from both American and Iraqi perspectives. Based on more than 120 interviews with Iraqis and U.S. Marines, Ardolino describes how a company of reservists, led by a medical equipment sales manager from Michigan, succeeded where previous efforts had stalled. Circumstance combined with smart, charismatic leadership enabled Americans to build relationships with members of a Sunni tribe—once written off as dangerous and intractable— who pushed al Qaeda and other insurgents from their notoriously rebellious area. Accidental killings, intertribal rivalries, insurgents, and intrigue all conspired to undo the tenuous alliance forged between the Americans and tribesmen on Fallujah’s Peninsula. But the partnership was cemented after a Marine commander’s risky decision to welcome nearly 100 injured civilians onto a secure American facility after a ruthless chemical attack by al Qaeda. The book’s gripping storyline will appeal to readers of historical nonfiction. Its exhaustive documentation will prove valuable to military students, analysts, and historians and will help policy makers better understand what is possible in counterinsurgency. Photographs and maps further enhance the reader’s understanding of everything from tribal dynamics to the geography of firefights.
Download or read book Suicide Bombers in Iraq written by Mohammed M. Hafez and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war in Iraq was supposed to be easy. Instead it has delivered the message that Islamic resistance and martyrdom can defeat the only remaining superpower, just as jihadists drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan during the 1980s. Now a haven for jihadists, Iraq has entered a civil war whose duration, scope, and magnitude have yet to be determined.The overwhelming majority of suicide attacks in Iraq have targeted Iraqi security forces and Shia civilians, not coalition forces. The perpetrators appear to be largely non-Iraqi volunteers. Many are from Saudi Arabia, but substantial numbers have come from Europe, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan and North Africa. They are foiling U.S. plans to stabilize the country and turn it into a democratic regime and an ally in a region of religious radicalism, entrenched authoritarianism, and hostile states with nuclear ambitions.Understanding the phenomenon of suicide bombing in Iraq is therefore vitally important for U.S. national security, foreign policy in the Muslim world, and the war on terrorism. This study, the first of its kind on the Iraqi insurgency, draws extensively on open-source intelligence and papers of record, primary sources from insurgent groups including online documents and videos, and interviews with U.S. servicemen who have served in Iraq. It examines the history of suicide bombing in Iraq and many other countries, theoretical perspectives on suicide bombing, the varied factions that comprise the insurgency, the ideology and theology of martyrdom supporting suicide bombers, their national origins and characteristics, and the prospects for a third generation of transnational jihadists forged in the crucible of Iraq."
Download or read book To Start a War written by Robert Draper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 “The detailed, nuanced, gripping account of that strange and complex journey offered in Robert Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is essential reading—now, especially now . . . Draper’s account [is] one for the ages . . . A must-read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most consequential decision in the history of American foreign policy--the decision to invade Iraq. Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of consequential new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. Draper's fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
Download or read book Lucky War written by Richard Moody Swain and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an account, from the point of view of the U.S. Army forces employed, of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the withdrawal of coalition forces from southeastern Iraq. It focuses on the Army's part in this war, particularly the activities of the Headquarters, Third Army, and the Army Forces Central Command (ARCENT). It looks especially at the activities of the VII Corps, which executed ARCENT's main effort in the theater ground force schwerpunkt -- General Schwarzkopf's "Great Wheel." This is not an official history; the author speaks in his own voice and makes his own judgments. Maps.
Download or read book Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 1.9 million U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since October 2001. Many service members and veterans face serious challenges in readjusting to normal life after returning home. This initial book presents findings on the most critical challenges, and lays out the blueprint for the second phase of the study to determine how best to meet the needs of returning troops and their families.
Download or read book Operation Iraqi Freedom written by Walter J. Boyne and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-11-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "New York Times" bestselling author of "Weapons of Desert Storm" presentsan informative look into the first war of the 21st century.
Download or read book Why America Fights written by Susan A. Brewer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why America Fights explores how the U.S. government has sold war aims designed to rally public support throughout the 20th century.
Download or read book They Will Have to Die Now Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate written by James Verini and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
