In a mud compound in the village of Sherwangai, troops displayed some of the spoils of war.

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Whatever else this means, firms should probably not start totting up their spoils of war just yet.

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Hashim even named his daughter Anfal, which is Arabic for 'spoils of war.

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The irony here, if irony is the right word, is that the Turkish state that I was describing in "Spoils of War" I thought had changed.

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Here, Mr. Edsel works the phones, appealing to the better angels of veterans who are holding on to spoils of war, perhaps even trying to sell them.

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That's a view echoed by "Spoils of War" author John Tirman, who adds that he will not travel to Turkey now for fear of arrest or imprisonment.

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Mr. JOHN TIRMAN (Author, "Spoils of War"): Now it is some of these things that the state is objecting to, the insulting of Ataturk, the likening of him to Mussolini, the criticism of Turkey's extreme forms of nationalism.

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Focusing almost exclusively on Congo, Dahomey (Benin) and Calabar (Nigeria), we're told how these African empires were primarily polytheistic, fought and traded with one another, formed alliances, arranged marriages and, yes, took slaves among themselves as spoils of war.

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When the Catholic Habsburgs defeated the Protestant Palatine Elector Frederick V in 1620, they reduced Heidelberg Castle to ruins and carried off the contents of the library as spoils of war - by this time totalling over 3, 500 manuscripts and 13, 000 printed works - to the Vatican Library in Rome where they remain to this day.

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