Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military Is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq

THIS IS A COMPLETELY FRESH, close-up look at the guerilla struggle in Iraq. It is built on weeks spent re-embedded with U.S. soldiers in the most dangerous parts of the Sunni Triangle in early 2004, direct polling of Iraqis, and unmatched reporting on combat raids, interrogations, daily diplomacy, and reconstruction heroics.

It follows the author’s Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, which was the first book from an embedded reporter describing the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Gripping, perceptive, funny, and bluntly honest, Boots became the most popular chronicle of the hot war in Iraq. Now Karl Zinsmeister has again beaten the pack with this groundbreaking sequel on the counterinsurgency phase of the war. This is a powerful, cliche-smashing, up-to-the-minute report on America’s most urgent national struggle, as seen through the eyes of ordinary Iraqis and the U.S. servicemen doing today’s dirty work.

Dawn Over Baghdad takes you into Iraq’s urban neighborhoods, rural villages, and guerilla snake pits, and shows exactly how young American soldiers are quietly but inexorably choking off a terrorist insurrection and planting the seeds (sometimes at great personal cost) of a dramatically different Middle East. Zinsmeister brings home a fascinating, intimate, and insightful story missed by the major media: With the quiet cooperation of millions of everyday Iraqis, the U.S. is approaching something historic – success in a tough guerilla war.

Includes a 32-page section of color photos taken by the author.