Chapter 42

The ISIS fighters jumped into their four technicals and tore out through the barbed wire perimeter of their temporary base. They had been tasked with watching the main highway south from Mosul a few hundred klicks north, but watching the main highway was boring, and the two vehicles jackrabbiting into the desert were easy prey. Bandits out of the Jazira, probably, come to scavenge and steal. They didn’t even call in the sighting. Killing them would take ten minutes, at most; their commanding officer, who never bothered coming this far from his headquarters, and who was Lebanese and didn’t know his way around this part of Iraq anyway, would never even know they had abandoned post.

The two vehicles disappeared suddenly, a few hundred meters in front of them. There must be a low dip in the flat desert there, the ISIS leader thought. It didn’t help that the moon had been waning for the past week, so the Jazira wasn’t as brightly lit as it had been only a few days ago.

’Asrae,” he yelled, smacking his driver in the head for emphasis. “’Asrae.” Faster.

They lipped the low spot and saw the two vehicles, or more precisely their dust clouds, because it was dusty even in slight depressions, where sand collected. The commanding officer covered his mouth with his head scarf, but he wasn’t worried. If they were this close to the dust cloud, the bandits couldn’t be far.

They never knew what hit them, but it was small arms fire, perilously close. It cracked across the desert and then fell silent, the fire discipline a wonder. By the time the technicals rolled to a stop, the desert had fallen silent again. The survivors didn’t even have time to fire back. They were executed with single shots, even the two gunners in the back technical who tried to surrender.

“Impressive,” a handsome young man said, turning to the older man beside him.

Colonel Hosseini took his binos from his eyes. His men were cleaning up the mess; he had seen it before.

“We are twelve,” he said, “but the Iranian Quds are always more than their number. How many do you have, Qais Khazali?”

“Two hundred,” Khazali said. “They are already north of Tikrit. They will be here before morning.”

“Good. We’ll need them,” the colonel said. He had never met a commanding officer who traveled with his advanced scouts before. Even General Suleimani, legendary for his presence at the front, traveled with his main force. No trained military man would do more. But of course, militia leaders weren’t trained. They recruited on the strength of their reputation, and commanded respect by being brave. Khazali, he knew, had fought with Muqtada al-Sadr during the American War. He had broken away and founded the League of the Righteous because he thought al-Sadr too soft. Under his leadership, the Righteous had grown into one of the most feared Shia paramilitaries in Iraq. Now that the Americans were vanquished, the militia even had a seat in parliament.

Most men would be sitting in that seat, the colonel thought, but instead Khazali was fighting with his men in the field. No wonder he was so respected, despised, and feared.