The Age of Jihad ─ Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

Award winning journalist chronicles the major conflict of our times

This is essential reading for anyone interested in the collapse of the Middle East, and the devastating role of the West in the creation of this hellish crucible. In The Age of Jihad Patrick Cockburn, the author of the best-selling The Rise of Islamic State, exposes the dominant conflict of our time—the Sunni–Shia war, and the subsequent origins of ISIS. As he shows this did not explode suddenly in Syria after the Arab Spring as the conventional view holds, but over several years in occupied Iraq. It is in the sectarian conflict that engulfed Iraq following the war of 2003 that patterns were established that would later spill over into Syria with such devastating results. Since July 2014, the dominance of ISIS has threatened the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western commentator to warn of ISIS, so far ahead of everyone else that last year the judges of the British Journalism Awards advised the UK government to “consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead.” The Age of Jihad will be the most in-depth analysis of the failure of the Middle East to date.

Patrick Cockburn is Middle East correspondent for the Independent and has worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written three books on Iraq’s recent history, including the National Book Circle awards shortlisted The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn) as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry’s Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. Winner of the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award 2014.