Author: Tom Cooper
Publisher: Middle East@War
ISBN: 9781914377174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 88
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Book Description
Officially established on 22 April 1931, around a core of 5 pilots and 32 aircraft mechanics, the Royal Iraqi Air Force was the first military flying service in any Arab country. Wings of Iraq, Volume 2 tells the story of the Iraqi Air Force between 1970 and 1980. In doing so it examines the air force's involvement in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and then the showdown with the Iranian-supported Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq in 1974-1975. These two affairs taught the Iraqis that numbers alone did not make an air force. Correspondingly, during the second half of the 1970s, Baghdad embarked on a project based on full technology transfer from France, which was intended to result in preparing the IrAF for the twenty-first century. This process hardly began when the new ruler in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein at-Tikriti, led his country into an invasion of neighboring Iran, embroiling it in a ruinous, eight-year-long war. This volume details the events leading up to the beginning of that war and its opening moves in the air. Although virtually 'born in battle', collecting precious combat experience and playing an important role in so many internal and external conflicts, the Iraqi Air Force remains one of the least known and most misinterpreted military services in the Middle East. Richly illustrated, Wings of Iraq, Volume 2, provides a uniquely compact yet comprehensive guide to its operational history, its crucial officers and aircraft, and its major operations between 1970 and 1980.
Author: Tom Cooper
Publisher: Middle East@War
ISBN: 9781913118747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Virtually born in battle, collecting precious combat experience and playing involved in so many conflicts, the Iraqi Air Force remains one of the most misinterpreted military services in the Middle East. Wings over Iraq provides a uniquely compact yet comprehensive guide to its operational history, officers, aircraft, and major operations.
Author: Mark A. Werkema
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 059514988X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
“ON A SECRET AIRSTRIKE MISSION ONE NIGHT, TWO U.S. EX-FIGHTER PILOTS WAGE WAR IN OLD SOVIET MIG-29 FULCRUMS OVER THE SKIES OF IRAQ…” Tensions are building again in the Gulf region. In the many years after the Gulf War, Iraq continues to threaten regional and world peace. Stability and peace in the Gulf are in peril. The U.S. is deeply concerned—action must be taken. Another war is imminent. The famed MiG-29 Fulcrum and the country of Iraq provide the backdrop for a top secret U.S. air strike and form the basis for a special-ops air war like one never attempted before…a daring mission against all odds. The stage is set for war. The MiG-29 Fulcrum is the quintessential foreign fighter of our day. Iraq is the ultimate enemy. A simple twist of fate, a modern-day aerial Trojan Horse, and an unlikely air strike mission turn into an ironic plot of tactical deception in the very act of war. These two pilots are American mercenaries, fighter jocks paid to fight a secret war flying the premiere jet combat fighter in the Iraqi arsenal. Flown with two MiG-29 Fulcrum’s, the Soviet-made state-of-the-art ultimate enemy fighter painted in Iraqi colors it is the ultimate deception in aerial combat. This is the very story of the Second Gulf War. Sometimes an act of war is not what anyone can believe—the very act of war of one nation against another that most would claim is improbable, unbelievable, unimaginable, and even impossible. For this night,they are the enemy.
Author: Eric Forsyth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578652993
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Historical novel set in Iraq in the turbulent lead up to WWII. The British patrol the oil fields using obsolete bombers. The Germans recruit local tribes to sabotage British efforts, as fascists ascend to power in Europe. Newly qualified RAF pilot Allan Chadwick's first assignment near Baghdad is an initiation into the realities of war and love.
Author: Richard Engel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416563261
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
In the most dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting since Michael Herr's classic Dispatches, NBC News's award-winning Middle East Bureau Chief, Richard Engel, offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of five years in Iraq. Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war. War Journal describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge. In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed. War Journal describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author's experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary -- itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC. War Journal is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be "the story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.
Author: Benjamin S Lambeth
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612513123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
America’s second war against Iraq differed notably from its first. Operation Desert Storm was a limited effort by coalition forces to drive out those Iraqi troops who had seized Kuwait six months before. In contrast, the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 was a more ambitious undertaking aimed at decisively ending Saddam Hussein’s rule. After several days of intense air strikes against fixed enemy targets, allied air operations began concentrating on Iraqi ground troops. The intended effect was to destroy Iraqi resistance and allow coalition land forces to maneuver without pausing in response to enemy actions. Iraqi tank concentrations were struck with consistently lethal effect, paving the way for an allied entrance into Baghdad that was largely unopposed. Hussein’s regime finally collapsed on April 9. Viewed in hindsight, it was the combination of allied air power as an indispensable enabler and the unexpected rapidity of the allied ground advance that allowed coalition forces to overrun Baghdad before Iraq could mount a coherent defense. In achieving this unprecedented level of performance, allied air power was indispensable in setting the conditions for the campaign’s end. Freedom from attack and freedom to attack prevailed for allied ground forces. The intended effect of allied air operations was to facilitate the quickest capture of Baghdad without the occurrence of any major head-to-head battles on the ground. This impressive short-term achievement, however, was soon overshadowed by the ensuing insurgency that continued for four years thereafter in Iraq. The mounting costs of that turmoil tended, for a time, to render the campaign’s initial successes all but forgotten. Only more recently did the war begin showing signs of reaching an agreeable end when the coalition’s commander put into effect a new counterinsurgency strategy in 2007 aimed at providing genuine security for Iraqi citizens. The toppling of Hussein’s regime ended the iron rule of an odious dictator who had brutalized his people for more than 30 years. Yet the inadequate resourcing with which that goal was pursued showed that any effective plan for a regime takedown must include due hedging against the campaign’s likely aftermath in addition to simply seeing to the needs of major combat. That said, despite the failure of the campaign’s planners to underwrite the first need adequately, those who conducted the three-week offensive in pursuit of regime change performed all but flawlessly, thanks in considerable part to the mostly unobserved but crucial enabling contributions of allied air power.
Author: Robert Owen Freedman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813012148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
"Freedman has collected an array of first-rate political analysts with differing perspectives and areas of expertise. . . . The result is a work of uniformly high quality . . . readable and up to date."--Jerrold D. Green, University of Arizona Center for Middle East Studies We may not live to see the end of the ripple effect of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the ensuing Gulf War. Meanwhile, this collection is one of the first systematic attempts to investigate the implications of that invasion for the significant political actors, in the Middle East and beyond. From varied perspectives and fields of interest, well-respected political scientists focus on the military dynamics of the war and its political effects on the Persian Gulf, on the Arab-Israeli zone of conflict, and on the superpowers. Of particular interest to many readers will be the analysis of both U.S. military and diplomatic strategy during the war and U.S. efforts to convene the Arab-Israeli peace talks after the war; Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to follow a "minimax" strategy under which he sought a minimum level of cooperation with the United States while retaining maximum influence in Iraq; the debate in Japan about whether to get involved in the Allied war effort; and the reasons for Palestinian support of Iraq during the war. Other subjects analyzed in the book include Saddam Hussein's postwar strategy for staying in power; Jordan's effort to walk a narrow tightrope between the Allies and Iraq; Syrian, Iranian, and Egyptian exploitation of the war to improve their regional positions; and the changes in Israel and Saudi Arabia precipitated by the war. Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science and dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Baltimore Hebrew University. He is the editor of Intifada: Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, and the Superpowers (UPF, 1991) and a prolific author and frequent lecturer on the Middle East. Contents Preface Introduction Part I: The Military and Political Dynamics of the Gulf War The Persian Gulf War: A Political-Military Assessment, by Bard E. O'Neill and Ilana Kass Part II: The Policy of External Powers U.S. Policy toward the Middle East after Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait, by Robert E. Hunter Moscow and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, by Robert O. Freedman Fire on the Other Side of the River: Japan and the Persian Gulf War, by Eugene Brown Part III: The Gulf Region Iraq after the Invasion of Kuwait, by Laurie Mylroie Iran from the August 1988 Cease-fire to the April 1992 Majlis Elections, by Shireen T. Hunter Saudi Arabia: Desert Storm and After, by F. Gregory Gause, III Part IV: The Eastern Mediterranean Israel, the Gulf War, and Its Aftermath, by Marvin Feuerwerger The Palestinians and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, by Helena Cobban Syria since 1988: From Crisis to Opportunity, by Alasdair Drysdale Jordanian Policy from the Intifada to the Madrid Peace Conference, by Adam Garfinkle Unipolarity and Egyptian Hegemony in the Middle East, by Louis Cantori
Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.
Author: Ferra Alas
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480899186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
Exotic Wings will take you through the journey I traveled from my sanctioned childhood to the war-torn teenage years, all the way to the American dream. Growing up in Iraq has created a survivor I never thought I would become. Through the hardships I faced, I found so much strength worth sharing with all of you out there, who perhaps wonder what it is like to live in Iraq. There is a trauma to living under a dictatorship, economic sanctions, and one war after another. The book entails a journey of recovery that will hopefully pave the path for some of you to learn to cope, embrace, and make peace with your past.
Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0451213092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
#1 bestselling author Ken Follett tells the inspiring true story of the Middle East hostage crisis that began in 1978, and of the unconventional means one American used to save his countrymen. . . . When two of his employees were held hostage in a heavily guarded prison fortress in Iran, one man took matters into his own hands: businessman H. Ross Perot. His team consisted of a group of volunteers from the executive ranks of his corporation, handpicked and trained by a retired Green Beret officer. To free the imprisoned Americans, they would face incalculable odds on a mission that only true heroes would have dared. . . .
