We Are Your Soldiers

Alex Rowell
Paperback, 416 pages
9781398514225

How Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt for eighteen years from the coup d'etat of 1952, is best known in the West for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires. He was a larger-than-life figure, loved by his followers for his nationalist ideals and for heralding a period of social change and modernisation. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser’s regime.

We Are Your Soldiers examines Nasser’s influence on the politics of seven countries – Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya. Rowell argues that Nasser played a crucial role in the formation of authoritarian regimes as varied as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. His encounters with each country were often drenched in blood and destruction, leaving deep scars that endure to the present. Crushing democracy at home while launching wars and slaying opponents abroad, Nasser ushered in the long political winter from which the region is still yet to emerge.

Drawing on extensive interviews and material never before published in English, Alex Rowell presents a thrilling and eye-opening work of history that radically reexamines Middle Eastern politics.