Nir Rosen: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World

“For Americans, the story of U.S. military involvement in the Islamic world centers on ‘us’ not ‘them,’ with Afghans and Iraqis cast as victims or bystanders. In this brilliantly reported and deeply humane book, Nir Rosen demolishes this self-serving picture, depicting the relationship between the occupied and the occupiers in all its nuanced complexity.” —ANDREW J. BACEVICH, author of Washington Rules

"A searing, first-hand account of the consequences of America's "war on terrorism" by one of the most respected voices on the Middle East. Honest, fearless, devastating. No one but Nir Rosen could have written this book."
—REZA ASLAN, author of No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism.

“Nir Rosen has almost single handedly rescued the name of journalism in the Middle East from a class of reporters who function as courtiers and propagandists for the military and our political elite. Rosen's fierce independence and honesty, as well as an ability to see the wars we are fighting from all sides, make his book exceptional for its nuance, complexity and insight into our bloody march through the Muslim world.”
—CHRIS HEDGES, author of Empire of Illusion
Nir Rosen’s AFTERMATH, an extraordinary feat of reporting, follows the contagious spread of radicalism and sectarian violence that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing civil war have unleashed in the Muslim world.

Rosen—who the Weekly Standard once bitterly complained has “great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency”— has spent nearly a decade among warriors and militants who have been challenging American power in the Muslim world. In AFTERMATH, he tells their story, showing the other side of the U.S. war on terror, traveling from the battle-scarred streets of Baghdad to the alleys, villages, refugee camps, mosques, and killing grounds of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and finally Afghanistan, where Rosen has a terrifying encounter with the Taliban as their “guest,” and witnesses the new Obama surge fizzling in southern Afghanistan.

Rosen was one of the few Westerners to venture inside the mosques of Baghdad to witness the first stirrings of sectarian hatred in the months after the U.S. invasion. He shows how weapons, tactics, and sectarian ideas from the civil war in Iraq penetrated neighboring countries and threatened their stability, especially Lebanon and Jordan, where new jihadist groups mushroomed. Moreover, he shows that the spread of violence at the street level is often the consequence of specific policies hatched in Washington, D.C. Rosen offers a seminal and provocative account of the surge, told from the perspective of U.S. troops on the ground, the Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents that were both allies and adversaries. He also tells the story of what happened to these militias once they outlived their usefulness to the Americans.

AFTERMATH is both a unique personal history and an unsparing account of what America has wrought in Iraq and the region. The result is a hair- raising, 360-degree view of the modern battlefield its consequent humanitarian catastrophe, and the reality of counterinsurgency.
Nir Rosen, best known for In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006) is a freelance writer, photographer, and film-maker who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other embattled lands.
He regularly contributes to leading periodicals, such as Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Review, and Harper's. He contributed to the footage of Iraq in Charles Ferguson's documentary No End In Sight and was also interviewed for the film.
Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, and a former fellow of the New America Foundation. In September 2007, he was the C.V. Starr Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin. He was invited to speak to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2008 about the present state of Iraq. Rosen consults for NGOs and has worked on many documentaries including a film he recently made for IFC called War, which is part of the IFC Media Project. A fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, he lives in New York City.

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