Sergeant Ma’ad, twenty-eight, Diyala Brigade, Division Two, Iraqi Special Operations Forces, father of five, craving a smoke. He sits on the ragged corner of a bed in West Mosul, lunching on pickled vegetables, bread, and grape juice. Beside Ma’ad lounges pudgy Corporal Abbas, shirtless in gym shorts, eyes clear, cheeks full and bright. His scars from the war include quarter-sized entry and exit wounds through his left forearm and belly fat. A skinny private lies on the bed, too, against the wall, watching videos on his phone. The room has the intimate air of a slumber party except one’s nose is always full of dust and sometimes, when the wind moves, the purple stink of corpses. Now and then other soldiers arrive, flop on the bed for a few minutes, get up, leave. The house is about eight hundred kilometers back from the front line, whose geometry is, at that time, variable. Through a barred window, the ancient Great Mosque of al-Nuri is visible, its famously leaning minaret cocked heavenward beneath the frequent passage of aircraft.
Rolling over on the bed, Abbas demonstrates how he requests American airstrikes.
“If you get ambushed,” says Abbas, zooming in on a Samsung tablet, “you can immediately send your coordinates—”
Ma’ad spots a soldier in the doorway and calls out, interrupting. “So you still didn’t bring back our nargileh? Come on, bring it back! The guys want to smoke!”
“All our work depends on this,” continues Abbas, holding up the tablet. Brightly colored dots indicate various units around the city. “This is the main tool of our fight. We give the airstrike targets. For example, if you see here, this is a suicide car here. And also it shows us the distance between us and other areas. When you point it, it shows you the distance from you and you can read the numbers. I will give it to my boss here, and then he transfers it to ISOF operation room, and then they call the Coalition. Even if a suicide car comes toward you, you give them the target of the street immediately, and when the airstrike comes he will find the suicide car—”
“These targets are not one hundred percent,” Ma’ad interrupts again, before Abbas finishes his thought. “These are probabilities.”
“And once we go to new area, we give them new targets. We update the map, we send our position: Do not shell us.” Abbas zooms in. “This is the school, we are here beside the school.”
An explosion shakes the walls.
“It’s far,” says Abbas.
Ma’ad points out the window: “No it’s very close. See, you can see the dust.”
Abbas looks, instead, down into the screen. “See the green point? This is us. This is the street on the left, this is the street on our right. See, we are in Rashan neighborhood, and right behind the school is al-Saha. These are the front lines.” He points. “And this is the Old City. See, it’s clear, it’s obvious, you can see everything. Now take it and zoom, but you have to wait a bit until it becomes clear and—”
Abbas pauses as Ma’ad’s radio crackles. A captain downstairs needs a ride. Ma’ad stands and swats the skinny private on the bed, tells him to get up.
“Come on, there are two drivers,” the private complains.
“I’m telling you,” says Ma’ad, “take him. Go or I’ll fuck your sister.”
The private, theatrically reluctant, gets up.
“Now he goes because he’s happy you’re going to fuck his sister,” says Abbas.
“What am I doing?” says the skinny private, shuffling off. “I take people, and I bring them back. And I don’t know why.”
“Just take him, motherfucker,” says Ma’ad.
Ma’ad sits back down, without a nargileh for a post-lunch smoke, and brushes crumbs from his black Special Forces T-shirt.28 The T-shirt is a popular war souvenir and like many foreign reporters I will eventually take one back home. I will give it to a woman I know who is undergoing treatment for lung cancer. The idea that courage is the same for everyone—for her, and Ma’ad, and ISIS fighters—is implied, even explicit, in much coverage of the war, when reporters quote soldiers or witnesses saying that whatever you think about ISIS, they’re brave.29 The division of courage and virtue is perhaps too readily accepted. None of this comes up in that house, though, and soon a young soldier in a different black T-shirt walks in and drops onto the bed. His shirt doesn’t have a Special Forces insignia; instead, it’s printed with a red heart and looping cursive text: Let me stick it in your butt.
“What does it mean?” Abbas asks, grinning.
Ma’ad rolls his eyes, gets back to talking about ISIS’s own airstrikes. They use drones, too, the cheap Chinese kind you can order online, jury-rigged to drop IEDs. From there Ma’ad gets to talking about why ISIS fighters are the way they are. He doesn’t mention Sunni disenfranchisement or any of the common conspiracy theories about Iranians, Jews, Saudis, or Americans backing ISIS. Instead, he says, “ISIS is unconscious, like, nothing in their mind. They told a big lie and then they believed the lie. Most of the ISIS we kill are kids.” 30
Most of the Iraqi Special Forces seem like kids, too, but somehow more than that. Young but raised in war, many possess an extreme fatalism, a calm more typically associated with age than youth. It’s tempting to call this demeanor ancient, but probably more accurate to think of it simply as a function of repeated trauma. Saif, for instance, twenty-seven, a kilometer or so down the line from Ma’ad, the kind of sniper who blows you a kiss as he walks through the door. He’s living, for a few days, on the second floor of an abandoned ISIS safe house, which is where we’re talking, after dinner, after he and his guys have cleared plastic plates and tidied the room and smoked together and laid down blankets. They graciously offer me a prime spot in front of the fan, between the guns and the hookah against the wall.
Saif’s from Kut, a city in eastern Iraq and site of political intrigue for thousands of years before T. E. Lawrence visited during World War I.31 Nine decades later, in Saif’s adolescence, the local military outpost housed American soldiers, but Saif didn’t much care. He was away to earn for the family, trading on his square-jawed charisma to sell vegetables in Baghdad. He lived in al-Hurriya, bought vegetables wholesale in Dora, carted them all over the capital’s poorer quarters, never finished high school, and came to hate selling vegetables, being so poor. Much better to join the Iraqi army and then, best of all, make the cut for the Counter Terrorism Service, CTS, and ISOF. Saif doesn’t think he will ever become an officer and, like Ma’ad and Abbas, knows nothing of civilian casualty counts or policies on this particular, slow-to-cool evening during the battle for Mosul.
Nor does Allawi, twenty-six, his best friend, wearing skull rings and a silver necklace, losing the hair on the top of his head but sporting a thick mustache. They met early in training—“that black hour,” deadpans Saif—and have been CTS for years now,32 become sage veterans of urban combat in Ramadi and Fallujah, though in the home screen photo on Allawi’s phone (case styled like a Washington state license plate, “Evergreen State”), they lean on each other like kids.
As we’re looking at the photo, a third soldier, Mohammed, interrupts, pointing.
“Who do you think took the photo?” he asks.
Allawi rolls his eyes. Mohammed is twenty-three, soft compared to the others, and quick to bring up the shrapnel in his legs. He’s a non-commissioned officer for media, and his courage is therefore suspect, especially since his uncle, General Khadir, is a big shot back at headquarters. Unlike Allawi and Saif, who are held close to unit command because, having demonstrated berserk bravery, they can be counted on to keep unit command alive, Mohammed seems to be held close because to lose him is to incur the wrath of superiors, of Higher—in some ways, more dangerous than a sniper. Still, the three young men seem to love one another.
The country is separated into different tribes,” Allawi explains. “For example, this guy,” he points at Saif, “is from the Soudani tribe. I’m from Sabihawi. So, if there is a problem between me and him, not just anyone can go and fix that problem. The big men from the tribe, they go and sit and talk and fix the problem. Like me, in the military, I have my boss, Major Khalid. If I fight with someone from another brigade, it’s not me who goes and fixes the problem, it’s my boss.”
Mohammed laughs. “You tell your boss,” he says, “if you make a problem?”
“Yes,” says Allawi, “I just said so.”
Allawi never takes Mohammed’s bait. Saif quietly backs him, as usual.
“Yeah, he gave an example,” says Saif.
“Chabawy,” Allawi goes on, naming Mohammed’s tribe, “cannot fix a problem between Sabihawi and Soudani.”
Leaning in from the next room, lanky Haider, a gunner, is impatient for a game of dominoes.
“Are you done?!”
“Come on,” yells Allawi, mock put-upon, “I’m still in the interview!” He turns back to me, composed. “The tribe you belong to—it’s like the army, you belong to your brigade. And we have a box we put money in. Every month we collect money. The money is for any problem facing the tribe. For example, a wedding, and someone doesn’t have any money. That box is the most important thing in the tribes.”
Mohammed, smirking, keeps at him: “You sure you give money to the box?”
“Every month. Even before I came to Mosul, I put money in the box.”
“You’re lying, you didn’t give any money.”
“I swear to God, I gave it to Abu Issa, and Issa took it to the box.” Allawi, in an aside, fills me in on Issa: “The head of our tribe. My cousin.”
“Issa?!” Mohammed almost squeals. “You gave it to Abu Issa and you’re sure Abu Issa is going to put it in the box? He won’t put it in the box!”
“We have sheikhs,” Allawi ignores Mohammed. “We give money to the sheikhs.”
Mohammed sits up from the blanket where he has been lounging. He clearly wants to talk about his own tribe. His black shirt, printed with a picture of a handgun, reads: THIS IS MY GLOCK. THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT BUT THIS ONE IS MINE.
Mohammed begins to explain his lineage, then hesitates. “We belong to . . . Aswad al Kindi. It’s in . . .”
Allawi chuckles. “He doesn’t know where they’re from.”
My fixer prompts Mohammed. “The main town? The big city?”
“Amara . . . !” Mohammed remembers, triumphant, grinning.
Allawi shakes his head. “You guys are a small tribe.”
Later, elsewhere in Mosul, I will be made, jokingly, an honorary Sabihawi.33 This is better in the moment than American Abroad, which is my most obvious tribal association and not a popular one in Mosul. The next day an Iraqi general will yell at me: “All that is happening now, I blame on the Americans! Before 2003, even a bird couldn’t come into Iraq! They opened all the borders! The American army, they still have bases in Germany!” 34
That night, though, after dinner, Allawi and his friends leave such points alone. “Americans are not on the ground with us,” Allawi says, “but in the sky. They support us with their planes. We have some stuff we call ‘Coalition jobs.’ Like, for suicide cars, we call airstrikes. When Haider is on the .50 cal and a car comes at us, Haider shoots it. But if the car is parked, we call the airstrike. . . . They don’t go without our targets. That’s my job, to see something and report it. But his job”—Allawi nods at Mohammed—“is to film it with his camera.”
Saif and Haider laugh at this, and Mohammed scowls, then laughs loudest.
Allawi shows me the wreckage of an airstrike when we go to buy groceries the following evening. It’s Ramadan and we’re hungry, walking the main drag of recently liberated al-Jadida, a neighborhood not far from Colonel Rabih’s station. We’re buying lamb for iftar. In a shadowed stall the butcher wrenches joints between his strong hand and a curved knife. A cloud of flies disperses, recombines. Allawi points out where the bodies fell. “Remember the eight bodies that were on the ground,” he’ll reflect to Mohammed, on return to the house. “Those eight bodies were right where we bought the meat . . . right in front of the butcher.”
The bodies on the street have been cleared, but no one knows how many remain under the masses of rubble abutting the market, a whole city block brought down. According to CENTCOM, in Tampa, Florida, at 8:24 one morning some weeks earlier an American aircraft launched a GBU-38 missile at a pair of snipers situated one block from the butcher. The snipers were harrying Ma’ad, Abbas, Allawi, Saif, Mohammed, and their fellow Counter Terrorism Service members as they advanced on the Old City and Tigris, killing every militant they found. From CENTCOM’s post-strike assessment:
CTS commanders and the [Target Engagement Authority] determined that it was a military necessity to neutralize the ISIS snipers in order for CTS to achieve its maneuver objective of seizing the sector from ISIS.
There was, famously, no plan for what would happen to Mosul once CTS reached the river, captured the al-Nuri mosque, and raised the flag. No Iraqi or American politician ever articulated, publicly at least, a substantive strategy beyond defeat of the enemy—even though the enemy, it was widely acknowledged, emerged in part from failures of political foresight during the preceding decades of (near) unilaterally waged war.35 This GBU-38, short for Guided Bomb Unit 38, would in particular have significant, unplanned-for consequences. The final Coalition count is two dead ISIS snipers, 105 dead civilians, and an additional thirty-six civilian deaths alleged but undetermined at the time of the report. The airstrike was the sixth of eighty-one executed in Mosul that day.
The market, though, one block over, is almost unscathed. We collect our lamb and turn to vegetables. A single three-story building between butcher shops and rows of vegetable carts is crumbled from the top, like a ruined cake, but the street is busy that evening, a vein of life. Long-lost friends greet each other with almost hysterical laughter, an astonishment at mutual survival. Teenagers bark wares—Juice! Fresh Juice! Baklava, fat watermelons, onions, blackening tomatoes, cucumbers for salting, primary-colored cellphone cases, Hello Kitty backpacks far from home again. The din is terrific: bargaining, the backfire of motorcycles, the rumble of Humvees, the yap of kicked dogs, the clicking of Kalashnikovs against the metal buckles of men in a hurry. One of the sweets sellers bobs his head to a beat as he transacts business, and when I ask he removes a shining earbud and hands it over, so I can hear the house music drowning it all out for him.
And at some point between sweets, meat, and vegetables I notice a girl, perhaps seven years old, blond, with eyes of blue and green, staring at me. She holds the hand of a smaller, even blonder boy. I point out the children to my fixer, surprised, and he looks at me with disappointment. He tells me: We have children who look like that, it’s normal. And then they’re gone into the crowd and I am abashed again. White Americans are at least as exceptional for the depth of our biases as our good intentions, and the two are married.
It’s an often disastrous psychic setup. But there are some worse ones at play in Mosul in those days, which really are days of tragedy. ISIS publications insist human existence as we know it is approaching an end, some apocalyptic inflection point. Beyond the battle in every direction, many secularists are doomsaying, too, though on account of science rather than myth. It’s during the campaign for Mosul that a portion of the Larsen C ice shelf, roughly the size of Delaware, breaks off Antarctica into the ocean.36 Discussion of the wider world, however, rarely occurs on the battle lines. Few Muslawis seem to care about Americans, for example—they just want security like the Americans have. Likewise, in New York, few care about the plight of the Muslawis. They just don’t want such trouble for themselves. By default we tend to desire before empathy. In myth, the consequences are often fatal. Icarus drowns, Narcissus wastes away, the House of Atreus falls.37 Myths in Mosul at the time are less didactic, closer to horror stories or jokes. Many circulate among Allawi and his comrades. ISIS fighters, one runs, have a single fear: being killed by a woman. Within their cosmology, apparently, if you’re killed by a woman, you lose your place in heaven. ISIS’s great fear, therefore, is female snipers, several of whom have been trained and deployed by Kurdish Peshmerga.38 I twice hear a story of a lone female sniper driving back a whole ISIS line. No battalion of women, though, is sent to liberate al-Jadida.39
Instead, the GBU-38. The U.S. military investigation into the incident, known as a 15-6,40 is headed by an Air Force brigadier general. The press release promises a link to a full report detailing the incident, which, it notes, was “approved in accordance with all the applicable rules of engagement and the Law of Armed Conflict.” The link never appears, but the executive summary asserts that on piercing the roof of the building in which the snipers were positioned, the GBU-38 caused a “sympathetic detonation” of previously emplaced IEDs, which destroyed the entire city block. “Subsequent engineering and weapons analysis,” it reads, “indicates that the GBU-38 should have resulted in no more than 16–20% damage to the structure, localized to the front of the second floor of the structure. . . . The target engagement authority was unaware of and could not have predicted the presence of civilians in the structure prior to the engagement . . . could not have predicted the compounded effects of the secondary explosives emplaced by ISIS fighters.”
The United States almost always does predict the violence it causes, though—generally, if not specifically. Later in the summer, the U.S. secretary of defense will say, at West Point: “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.” Then, in almost the same breath, he’ll say: “The American people and the American military will never get used to civilian casualties.” 41,42
Back in the abandoned house, Allawi is in an expansive mood after we unpack the groceries. “Feel as though you are the guests of the Sabihawis,” he says, with grand irony, before beginning the story of how he came to be fighting in Mosul. Back when Saif was carting vegetables, Allawi was mopping floors. As a twelve-year-old, he dropped out of school when a cousin got him a maintenance job on the Iraqi side of a Coalition base, for a foreign contractor called KBR. In Allawi’s telling, he’s good at the job and so is promoted quickly to the American side, and eventually to a military college, where he’s put to work in a bakery.
Mohammed enters from the fly-baffled kitchen with a modest tray of melon wedges.
“Tell my story,” Mohammed pleads. “Come on.”
“You make . . . bread?” I ask, catching up to the translation.
“I can’t make bread. I was an accountant.”
“But you were twelve years old . . . ?”
“Like, the officers’ kitchen.” Allawi is patient, communicating through our fixer. “They need twelve hundred samoon, they were putting them in boxes. I was writing: ‘twelve hundred samoon to officers’ kitchen.’ Or: ‘four thousand samoon to finance.’ They would come in and pick it up, and I was keeping account.”
Samoon is diamond-shaped Iraqi bread. Allawi grins conspiratorially.
“And if there were two hundred samoon extra, I sold them. To the soldiers.”
“And the money?” I ask.
“To my pocket, for me. Between me and you.” He laughs. Then he shouts to Haider, in the next room. “I’m explaining how corrupt I was when I was working for the Americans.”
Saif, who has been out of the room, returns and sits.
“You’re still talking?” he asks.
“We talked about you,” Allawi tells him.
The melon is almost gone, but we also have a box of baklava, for which Saif reaches. He’s always eating. Allawi watches. When Saif was out of the room to mix us the chalky protein shakes he likes, Allawi told a story of his bravery. How, in the midst of a firefight, Saif had leapt from their Humvee and run, grenade in hand, directly at an ISIS fighter across open terrain and killed him, saving Major Khalid and Allawi.
“You told that story?” asks Saif, indifferently.
Mohammed, watching this exchange, wipes melon juice from his chin. He is clearly saddened by his exclusion, this time, his face momentarily delicate. Allawi notices.
“Let’s not forget Mohammed,” he says. “Once we were advancing on Gogjali. He was recording us, and he got shot in the leg.” He nods seriously. “Let’s mention it. This is for history. And we have evidence!”
Allawi scrolls through his phone for the picture. Then he lowers his voice, but not so low that Mohammed and the rest of the room fail to hear him say: “He stayed home for a long time and fucked up his job. The Americans treated him and he felt relaxed because of their American hands, all over him. . . .”
The fixer and I and the other soldiers erupt in laughter over Mohammed’s protests, but Saif does not, absorbed in the baklava.
“And we have Saif,” says Allawi, teasingly, as though to reintroduce him from scratch, “who eats all the sweets.”
Saif, his mouth full of crust and honey, looks up from the pastries. Then he asks Allawi, with only the barest hint of interest, as though the interpreter and I aren’t in the room: “He’s gonna mention this?”
Maybe it’s this attitude—his story is unimportant, his life is expendable43—which suggests the word ancient for Saif. But it seems more tactic than truth, from him, as though actually desperate to live, he treats death with indifference, to keep it at bay.
Six weeks later, ISIS kills two of Allawi, Saif, and Mohammed’s commanding officers—Lieutenant Idris and Major Khalid. Allawi is lucky he’s not driving them at the time. The officers die in a suicide car bomb attack, referred to as a mofakhakha. This is one of two words that stop everything, wherever you are, whatever the circumstance. If someone hears it shouted through the din, he shouts it in turn, and everyone runs for cover, shouting Mofakhakha! The other word is qanas, which means “sniper,” though reactions are not as hurried for snipers. Allawi has heard the words shouted in warning hundreds of times, lost dozens of comrades. And yet, over the course of our ranging interviews, there’s only one topic that upsets him. It’s late, after dinner on the day we go to the market, and I ask him how many people he thinks died in the Jadida strike, targeting that pair of qanas.
“They say one hundred and seventy or one hundred eighty civilians got killed,” Allawi tells me, voice rising, almost cracking, “but we weren’t the cause of that to happen. We’re not the army, we’re not the federal police, we’re the Special Forces, and it wasn’t our fault . . . ! All this happened, not because of the U.S., but because of ISIS using the houses!” 44
The question of fault aside, the United States claims to have executed the strike for the Special Forces’ safety. In the al-Jadida investigation report, CENTCOM’s justification runs as follows:
If the ISIS snipers were left to continue to engage CTS forces, CTS would incur unacceptable levels of casualties in the seizure of the sector.
That is: Without the airstrike, too many men like Allawi—and Saif, Mohammed, Ma’ad, and Abbas—would have died.
The logic of this proposition depends not only on their mission as defined by its creators, but on the definition of “unacceptable.” That summer, the U.S. and Iraqi militaries not only accept the Mosul operation, they trumpet it as a great success in the offensive against the Islamic State, a major victory in the larger war against terrorism. On the basis of its success, in fact, the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense asks for $1.8 billion in funding for the following year’s training, advising, and assistance in Iraq and Syria—despite noting, in its budgetary justification, that CTS “suffered 40 percent battle losses in Mosul.” 45 Nearly every other soldier. Before year’s end, the U.S. Congress grants the funding in full.
“Honestly,” Allawi tells me, “I don’t know what to say about political stuff. We don’t have TVs, we don’t follow the situation of other countries, we’re here fighting the war all the time. . . . We hear, sometimes, what’s going on, but you know,” he shrugs, “ours is not politics. Ours is military. I hope this situation finishes. I don’t care about other countries, revolutions, protest. I only hope this situation finishes.”