The Miracle of the Kurds

The Miracle of the Kurds PDF Author: Stephen Mansfield
Publisher: Worthy Books
ISBN: 1617955116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The story of one American's Quixote-like vision for Kurdistan following Saddam's barbarous attacks of the early 1990s - encouraging the Kurds to build one of the most remarkable, hopeful, and prosperous cultures in not just the Middle East but the world.

The Miracle of the Kurds

The Miracle of the Kurds PDF Author: Stephen Mansfield
Publisher: Worthy Books
ISBN: 1617955116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The story of one American's Quixote-like vision for Kurdistan following Saddam's barbarous attacks of the early 1990s - encouraging the Kurds to build one of the most remarkable, hopeful, and prosperous cultures in not just the Middle East but the world.

The Cambridge History of the Kurds

The Cambridge History of the Kurds PDF Author: Hamit Bozarslan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108583016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1027

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.

A People Without a State

A People Without a State PDF Author: Michael Eppel
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477311076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Numbering between 25 and 35 million worldwide, the Kurds are among the largest culturally and ethnically distinct people to remain stateless. A People Without a State offers an in-depth survey of an identity that has often been ignored in mainstream historiographies of the Middle East and brings to life the historical, social, and political developments in Kurdistani society over the past millennium. Michael Eppel begins with the myths and realities of the origins of the Kurds, describes the effect upon them of medieval Muslim states under Arab, Persian, and Turkish dominance, and recounts the emergence of tribal-feudal dynasties. He explores in detail the subsequent rise of Kurdish emirates, as well as this people’s literary and linguistic developments, particularly the flourishing of poetry. The turning tides of the nineteenth century, including Ottoman reforms and fluctuating Russian influence after the Crimean War, set in motion an early Kurdish nationalism that further expressed a distinct cultural identity. Stateless, but rooted in the region, the Kurds never achieved independence because of geopolitical conditions, tribal rivalries, and obstacles on the way to modernization. A People Without a State captures the developments that nonetheless forged a vast sociopolitical system.

Long Shot

Long Shot PDF Author: Azad Cudi
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802146899
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A Kurdish journalist who volunteered as a sniper in the fight against ISIS reveals his story in a “gripping memoir . . . elegantly told” (Publishers Weekly). In 2002, at age nineteen, Azad was conscripted into Iran’s army and forced to fight his own people. Refusing to go to war against his fellow Kurds, he deserted and smuggled himself to the United Kingdom, where he was granted asylum, became a citizen, and learned English. But in 2014, having returned to the Middle East as a social worker in the wake of the Syrian civil war, Azad found he would have to pick up a weapon once again. After twenty-one days of intensive training as a sniper, Azad became one of seventeen volunteer marksmen deployed by the Kurdish army when ISIS besieged the city of Kobani in Rojava, the newly autonomous region of the Kurds. Here, he tells the inside story of the Kurdish forces’ bloody street battles against the Islamic State. Vastly outnumbered, the Kurds would have to kill the jihadis one by one, and Azad takes us on a harrowing journey to reveal the sniper unit’s essential role in ISIS’s eventual defeat. Weaving the brutal events of war with personal and political reflection, he meditates on the incalculable price of victory—the permanent effects of war on the body and mind; the devastating death of six of his closest comrades; the loss of hundreds of volunteers in battle. But as Azad explains, these sacrifices saved not only a city but a people and their land. “A propulsive memoir that captures the grim reality of small-scale conflict and reveals the fragmented politics of the Middle East today” (Kirkus Reviews), Long Shot tells how, against all odds, a few thousand men and women achieved the impossible and kept their dream of freedom alive.

Crescent and Star

Crescent and Star PDF Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374531404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Reports on conditions in Turkey at the beginning of the twenty-first century, looking at the country's potential to become a world leader, and examining the factors that could keep that from happening.

Invisible Nation

Invisible Nation PDF Author: Quil Lawrence
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802718817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The American invasion of Iraq has been a success - for the Kurds. Kurdistan is an invisible nation, and the Kurds the largest ethnic group on Earth without a homeland, comprising some 25 million moderate Sunni Muslims living in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Through a history dating back to biblical times, they have endured persecution and betrayal, surviving only through stubborn compromise with greater powers. They have always desired their own state, and now, accidentally, the United States may have helped them take a huge step toward that goal. As Quil Lawrence relates in his fascinating and timely study of the Iraqi Kurds, while their ambition and determination grow apace, their future will be largely dependent on whether America values a budding democracy in the region, or decides to yet again sacrifice the Kurds in the name of political expediency. Either way, the Kurdish north may well prove to be the defining battleground in Iraq, as the country struggles to hold itself together. At this extraordinary moment in the saga of Kurdistan, informed by his deep knowledge of the people and region, Lawrence's intimate and unflinching portrait of the Kurds and their heretofore quixotic quest offers a vital and original lens through which to contemplate the future of Iraq and the surrounding Middle East.

The End of Iraq

The End of Iraq PDF Author: Peter W. Galbraith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847396127
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The invasion of Iraq by American, British and other coalition forces has indeed transformed the Middle East, but not as the Bush and Blair administrations had imagined. It is Iran, not Western-style democracy, that has emerged as the big winner, creating a Tehran-Baghdad axis that would have been unthinkable before the war. THE END OF IRAQ is the definitive account of the US and UK's catastrophic involvement in Iraq, as told by America's leading independent expert on the country. Peter Galbraith reveals in exquisite detail how US policies -- some going back to the Reagan administration -- have now produced a nearly independent Kurdistan in the north, an Islamic state in the south, and uncontrollable insurgency in the centre, and an incipient Sunni-Shiite civil war that has Baghdad as its central front. Iraq, Galbraith argues, cannot be reconstructed as a single state. Instead, a sensible strategy must accept that it has already broken up and focus instead on stopping an escalating civil war. Unflinching, accessible and powerful, THE END OF IRAQ explores and explains the myriad mistakes and false assumptions that have brought the country to its current pass, and what must be done to prevent further bloodshed.

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men PDF Author: Stephen Mansfield
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 1595553746
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Witty, compelling, and shrewd, Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men is about resurrecting your inborn, timeless, essential, masculine self. The Western world is in a crisis of discarded honor, dubious integrity, and faux manliness. It is time to recover what we have lost. Stephen Mansfield shows us the way. Working with timeless maxims and stirring examples of manhood from ages past, Mansfield issues a trumpet call of manliness fit for our times. In Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men, you’ll see that: This book is about doing. It is about action. It is about knowing the deeds that comprise manhood and doing those deeds. Habits have to be formed, and actions have to be aligned with the grace received. “My goal in this book is simple,” Mansfield says. “I want to identify what a genuine man does?the virtues, the habits, the disciplines, the duties, the actions of true manhood?and then call men to do it.”

Syria's Kurds

Syria's Kurds PDF Author: Jordi Tejel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134096437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Jordi Tejel presents – combining different disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology – a new understanding of the dynamics leading to the consolidation of a Kurdish minority awareness in contemporary Syria. The book explores in particular how conditions for a change in ethnic strategy, from one of 'dissimulation' to one of 'visibility', have emerged amongst Syria's Kurds.

Iraq

Iraq PDF Author: Geoff Hann
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
ISBN: 1841624888
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Iraq is a country with a rich culture. Ancient sites such as Babylon and Ur, the stunning architecture of the country's mosques, the natural beauty and wildlife of the Marshes and beautiful Iraqi handicrafts create a myriad of attractions to inspire even the most seasoned traveler. This brand-new edition of Iraq gives up-to-date travel information and also informs the armchair traveler about the history and exciting archaeological prospects of this ancient land. The authors, Geoff Hann and Karen Dabrowska, bring their considerable knowledge and understanding of Iraq to provide all the practical and background information needed to explore this country and to get the most out of your trip: advice on cultural awareness and religious sensitivity in the context of Iraqi history, along with in-depth coverage of what to see and where to go make this an invaluable guide.