Middle East Politics

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States.

In the age of Brexit and Trump, the West is buffeted by the tides of isolationism and fragmentation. Yet to the East, this is a moment of optimism as a new network of relationships takes shape along the ancient trade routes. In The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan takes us on an eye-opening journey through the region, from China's breathtaking infrastructure investments to the flood of trade deals among Central Asian republics to the growing rapprochement between Turkey and Russia.

A rich and varied collection of contemporary short stories, extracts from novels, and poetry that will go a long way toward informing the English-speaking world of the latest developments in Iranian literature. This sampling - or to use the Farsi term golchine, a bouquet - provides a window onto an important but sorely neglected segment of world culture. We hope it will also serve to awaken further interest in the work and in translations of Iranian novelists and poets.

In The Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs. Washington's secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies.

Steven A. Cook charts the course of the United States' encounter with the Middle East from the mid-twentieth century through the present day. Looking back, Cook makes a bold claim: the US was—despite setbacks and moral costs—successful. That record of achievement began to unravel in the early 1990s when policymakers embarked upon a set of overly ambitious policies to remake the Middle East. Cook highlights that calls to withdraw from the region are rash given the important interests the US maintains in the region.

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour, he has little use for his mission—uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. Then Collins meets Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain most expats never experience, to questions he never thought to ask.

The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war - a rare achievement for any Afghan woman - Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own.

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan - a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood.

In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed young war reporter chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler’s road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee, in search of a better future.

Kicking the Hornet’s Nest is a riveting exploration of how twelve US presidents have shaped the Middle East, often unleashing instability and conflict along the way. It is also the story of one US president who successfully charted a better course. From Truman to Trump, Daniel Zoughbie meticulously unpacks the decisions that have set the stage for today’s unrest. But this book is more than just a history lesson; it’s a sharp analysis of presidential decision-making and its far-reaching consequences.

The long agony of the “sick man of Europe”, an expression used by the tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind people to its incredible power and history. Preserving its mixed heritage - coming from both its geographic position, rising above the ashes of the Byzantine Empire, and the tradition inherited from the Muslim conquests - the Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries.

Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and soon became a leader within Jabotinsky’s Betar movement.

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.

米国と欧州は自滅した。 日本が強いられる「選択」は？ ロシアの計算によれば、そう遠くないある日、ウクライナ軍はキエフ政権とともに崩壊する。

These are the combat experiences of the first Marine to command a special operations task force, recounted against a backdrop of his journey from raw Second Lieutenant to seasoned Colonel and Task Force Commander; from leading Marines through the streets of Mogadishu, Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul to directing multi-national special operations forces in a dauntingly complex fight against a formidable foe.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.

Within hours of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the FBI had evidence pointing to Islamic extremists. But incredibly, federal authorities quickly squelched all investigations implicating Middle Eastern suspects. Here, award-winning investigative reporter Jayna Davis shares a gripping and intensely personal account of her arrival on the scene 13 minutes after the blast, the worldwide search for suspects, and the abrupt abandonment of the manhunt for John Doe #2.

Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.

Everyone has heard of Erdogan: Turkey’s bullish, mercurial president is the original postmodern populist. Around the world, other strongmen are now following the path that he has blazed. For the first time, Erdogan Rising tells the inside story of how a democracy on the fringe of Europe has succumbed to dictatorship. Hannah Lucinda Smith, Turkey correspondent with The Times of London, has witnessed all that has befallen Turkey and the wider region since the onset of the Arab Spring.

In Doomed to Succeed, Ross takes us through every administration from Truman to Obama, throwing into dramatic relief each president's attitudes toward Israel and the region, the often tumultuous debates between key advisers, and the events that drove the policies and at times led to a shift in approach.