‘Three Worlds’ by Avi Shlaim review
Some 110,000 Jews left Iraq in 1950 and 1951 – a Jewish community that could trace its origins back to the Babylonians.
Iraq
Military State
Iraq faces an ongoing crisis of sovereignty, 90 years after independence.
The Central Problem
Surveying the world of Late Antiquity from its Persian centre.
The First Tanker War
If tensions between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf lead to war, it will not be the first time.
Kut Losses
Two imperial ventures, in the same Middle East town a century apart, reveal the similarities – and differences – in the exercise of power.
The Battle for Oil in the First World War
At the beginning of the 20th century the Great Powers competed for the right to extract the vast oil reserves around the Iraqi city of Mosul. The motivation – and prize – was energy security.
Sheep Safely Graze: Iraq 1960
Roger Hudson details the defining role played by oil in the predominantly Kurdish-populated city of Kirkuk in Iraq.
Stranger than the Nights
Justin Marozzi admires Hugh Kennedy’s article from 2004, which offers a nuanced portrait of the great Abbasid caliph, Harun al Rashid, much-mythologised hero of The Arabian Nights.
Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude
Cyril Falls profiles perhaps the ideal soldier in war and, certainly, the ideal British Commander-in-Chief.
The Epic of Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Philosophy
Possibly some innate realism prevented the Mesopotamians from seeing death other than objectively. But the Epic of Gilgamesh remains an eloquent witness to the poignancy of their interrogation of the meaning of human life and destiny. S.G.F. Brandon.