Emma Sky, Director of Yale World Fellows; Senior Fellow, Jackson Institute; Author, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq

In association with the Marines Memorial Association

When Emma Sky, an intrepid young British woman, volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, she had little idea what she was letting herself in for: a tour that would last more than a decade, longer than that of any senior military or political official. As the only adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and the closest confidante to U.S. General Odierno, Sky was valued for her controversial voice and outsider’s point of view—during the most painful stages of the war, she was one of the few to develop friendships and relationships with both Iraqis and Americans alike.

In the West, violence in Iraq is typically explained away as the symptom of psychopathic terrorists, blurring and arbitrary colonial borders, and ancient hatreds between Sunni and Shia. But the violence stems from weak governance and corrupt elites, empowered by the U.S.-led coalition, who use sectarianism to mobilize support and fail to deliver service to the meet the needs of the country’s citizens. Women and men, Iraqis and Americans, soldiers and civilians, the ordinary and yet extraordinary, Western and Eastern cultures all collide in Iraq. Since the beginning of the invasion in 2003, Sky has been a tireless witness to American efforts to impose democracy on a country traumatized by decades of war and sanctions, newly liberated from the most brutal of regimes; the Iraqi who became insurgents and the insurgencies that morphed into civil war; the 2007 surge and then the drawdown of U.S. troops; the pitfalls and limitation of foreign powers; and the takeover by the Islamic State.

A consummate insider, called the “modern-day Gertrude Bell” by The Times of London, Sky provides insight into the ordered world of the U.S. military, the complexities, diversity and evolution of Iraqi society during in the last 10 years of uninterrupted conflict and the struggle to find stability in post-Saddam Iraq. With sharp detail, tremendous empathy and devotion to all those who served—The Unraveling is an intimate portrait of Americans who killed and cared, of friendships, humanity, the quest for peace and the failure of United States strategy.