"Under Every Yard Of Sky" by Sebastian Meyer

In 2003, after decades of war, peace and prosperity were on the horizon for Iraq’s Kurds. Gone was Saddam Hussein’s violent oppression. Gone was the Kurdish civil war. Gone were poverty and crippling international sanctions. With new-found oil reserves, foreign investment flooded in. Kurdistan was peaceful and wealthy. Then in 2014, ISIS appeared and all the peace and prosperity fell away. Battles raged for over two years, killing hundreds of Kurdish soldiers. To make matters worse, the price of oil dropped, bottoming out the region’s economy. The Kurds dreams of escaping their violent past began to dissolve. “Under Every Yard of Sky” tells the story of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, a region unable to escape a seemly endless cycle of violence.