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From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegration The Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today’s Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Cockburn explores the vast geopolitical struggle that is the Sunni–Shia conflict, a clash that shapes the war on terror, western military interventions, the evolution of the insurgency, the civil wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria, the Arab Spring, the fall of regional dictators, and the rise of Islamic State. As Cockburn shows in arresting detail, Islamic State did not explode into existence in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, as conventional wisdom would have it. The organization gestated over several years in occupied Iraq, before growing to the point where it can threaten the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western journalist to warn of the dangers posed by Islamic State. His originality and breadth of vision make The Age of Jihad the most in-depth analysis of the regional crisis in the Middle East to date.

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The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East from the Winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of The Year Award. Out of the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and Syria, a new threat emerges. While Al-Qaeda is weakened, new jihadi movements, especially ISIS, are starting to emerge. In military operations in June 2014 they were far more successful that Al Qaeda ever were, taking territory that reaches across borders and includes the city of Mosul. The reports of their military coordination and brutality to their victims are chilling. While they call for the formation of a new caliphate once again the West becomes a target. How could things have gone so badly wrong? In The Rise of Islamic State, Cockburn analyses the reasons for the unfolding of US and the West’s greatest foreign policy debacle and the impact that it has on the war torn and volatile Middle East.

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In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Turkey's attack on Kurdish territory in November 2019, and recounts the new phase in the wars of disintegration that have plagued the region, leading to the assassination of Iranian General Sulemani.Cockburn offers panoramic on-the-ground analysis as well as a lifetime's study of the region. As author of The Rise of Islamic State , and the Age of Jihad , he has proved to be leading, critical commentator of US intervention and the chaos it has wrecked/ And here he shows how, since Trump entered the White House promising an end to the Forever War, peace appears a distant possibility with the continuation of conflict in Syria, Saudi Arabia's violent intervention in the Yemen, the fall of the Kurds, riots in Baghdad, and the continued aggression towards Iran. While ISIS has been defeated, it is not clear whether it has disappeared from the region. Trump's policies has appeared to pour petrol on the flames, emboldening the other superpowers involved in the proxy wars. Following the collapse of the deal with Iran, and the threat of war crimes, is a new balance of power possible?

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Europe is facing an unprecedented and growing terror threat as homegrown extremists inspired by jihadis and an Islamic State squeezed by the West are desperate to attack outside the ‘caliphate’. Terrorism in Europe: In the Crosshairs, examines this extreme threat to Europe through a collection of articles by journalists of The Independent.

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In Patrick Cockburn on Iraq: The West Shakes Up The Middle East, The Independent continues its series of History As It Happened books. Over the past 15 years the US and its allies should have had the greatest interest in maintaining a Middle East status quo. But, as Cockburn details in a series of insightful articles published in The Independent, the West has been the most radical instrument of change in the Middle East.

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