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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
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Edison 64
(Paperback)
Richard Sand
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R629
R525
Discovery Miles 5 250
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Under the blazing Iraqi sun in the summer of 2007, Shannon Meehan,
a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, ordered a strike that would take the
lives of innocent Iraqi civilians. He thought he was doing the
right thing. He thought he was protecting his men. He thought that
he would only kill the enemy, but in the ruins of the strike, he
discovers his mistake and uncovers a tragedy.
For most of his deployment in Iraq, Lt. Meehan felt that he had
been made for a life in the military. A tank commander, he worked
in the violent Diyala Province, successfully fighting the
insurgency by various Sunni and Shia factions. He was celebrated by
his senior officers and decorated with medals. But when the U.S.
surge to retake Iraq in 2006 and 2007 finally pushed into Baqubah,
a town virtually entirely controlled by al Qaida, Meehan would make
the decision that would change his life. This is the true story of
one soldier's attempt to reconcile what he has done with what he
felt he had to do. Stark and devastating, it recounts first-hand
the reality of a new type of warfare that remains largely unspoken
and forgotten on the frontlines of Iraq.
The Iraq War is a visual record of the American-led Operation Iraqi
Freedom of 2003, which resulted in the dramatic overthrow of
dictator Saddam Hussein. In a striking sequence of photographs
Anthony Tucker-Jones shows how this was achieved by the American
and British armed forces in a lightning campaign of just two weeks.
But the photographs also show the disastrous aftermath when the
swift victory was undermined by the outbreak of the Iraqi
insurgency - in the Shia south, in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle,
and in Fallujah where two ferocious battles were fought. The
author, who is an expert on the Iraqi armed forces and has written
extensively on the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, gives a
fascinating insight into the Iraqi army and air force and into the
multitude of weapons systems Saddam purchased from around the
world. He also looks at the failures on the American and British
side - the flaws in the tactics that were used, the poor
performance of some of the armoured fighting vehicles - and at the
reformed Iraqi armed forces who have now taken responsibility for
security in the country. The Iraq War is a vivid photographic
introduction to a conflict that has only just passed into history.
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