His name was Moataz.
Before he was killed, he had run away from a father and a mother and four brothers and sisters who waited and hoped for his safe return after the war. They searched for him in hospitals and prisons and combed the rubble of bombed-out neighborhoods. For more than a year they looked and prayed. Then when Eddie was charged, news of the court-martial reached Iraq, and they finally learned what had happened to him.
Moataz Mohamed Abdullah was seventeen years old the day he was killed. He had been born in western Mosul in 2000, just a few years before the United States invaded, and grown up a Sunni Muslim in a city dominated by Sunnis. His parents were not particularly religious, nor were they part of the connected political class of Sunnis that had enjoyed preferential treatment under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. His father sold used cars for a living. They were simple people. Moataz went to the public schools. He worshiped at a small neighborhood mosque. He liked to play soccer in the street and swim in the Tigris. Up to the day he ran away, his parents still called him by a nickname he had been given as a baby, Azooz.
His father, Mohamed Salim, had also been born in Mosul. Before the Americans came, there was Saddam. Mohamed didn’t love Saddam or hate him. He just lived with him. Saddam was far from perfect, but at least during the time of Saddam the city was safe. Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians and Yazidis all lived together. And people bought cars. On days off, Mohamed liked to go down to the Tigris to fish in the slow green water.
By the time the United States invaded in 2003, Mohamed was married and had two sons. Moataz was the second. Mohamed tried to keep going with his old life as foreign troops surged into the city and the streets slowly fell into chaos. Saddam’s ruling party was driven out of power, and there was no one to make the city run. Looting and blackouts followed. Garbage piled up in the streets. The resentment toward the American soldiers fed an armed insurgency that became increasingly bloody. Bombs targeted police stations and hospitals. Shootings and sectarian revenge killings became part of life. Suicide bombers would hit the Americans at their checkpoints. In response the Americans would sweep in at night, making scores of arrests in search of terrorist cells. A lot of people died for no reason. The raids stoked resentment, which led to more bombings. The Americans erected concrete blast walls to divide up neighborhoods. Long lines at checkpoints and harsh curfews became the norm. Residents sometimes felt like they were treated like enemies in their own city.
Mohamed tried to raise his family peacefully amid the violence, but people weren’t driving as much, and his business suffered. The family sometimes barely scraped by. He and his wife kept going about their simple daily efforts to provide, hoping that with patience things would get better. Mohamed’s biggest worry was that one of his loved ones might get killed in the crossfire.
When the Americans left in 2011, the Iraqi government that replaced them wasn’t a big improvement. The government and military were mostly Shia Muslims and took a harsh stance toward overwhelmingly Sunni Mosul. The Iraqi soldiers stationed in the city often viewed the locals as terrorists and treated people even worse than the Americans had. Blast walls and checkpoints kept the city in lockdown. Nighttime raids still took young men from their homes.
Life in Mosul was a far cry from what it had been before more than a decade of war, but Mohamed’s son, Moataz, had never known anything different. Despite the violence and uncertainty, he appeared to be growing up to be a fine young man. He did well in school and was kind to his parents. His face would light up when his mother made Mosul’s famous dolmas with stuffed eggplant and spicy peppers. He shared a bedroom with his older brother and covered his half with posters of pop stars and soccer players. Soccer was his passion. When he wasn’t kicking a ball, he was watching matches on TV or searching for stats about his favorite strikers.
Moataz had a natural charisma. He knew how to talk to people. He would sometimes help his father close deals on cars. Though the family business traditionally went to the oldest son, his father thought Moataz would be a better fit. He had a head for numbers and a durable charm. He was just about to start high school when the Islamic State invaded.
ISIS appeared from the west, arriving in swarms of commandeered pickups and stolen Humvees. When the fighters swept into the city, some of the family’s neighbors fled. With five children and no obvious place to go, Mohamed decided to wait it out. He had seen militants attack parts of the city before, only to be driven out in a few hours. The Iraqi Army had tanks, helicopters, and thousands of troops. Taking back Mosul from what amounted to a street gang with a few Toyotas wouldn’t take long. He kept the family inside and waited. But the Iraqi counterattack didn’t come that day or that month, or even that year. The family found themselves living in the largest city of the Islamic State’s self-described caliphate.
At first, ISIS didn’t seem any worse than the city’s previous occupiers. Yes, they tore down posters and billboards that displayed women in Western dress and other images forbidden by their harsh brand of Islam. They banned cigarettes, alcohol, and Western music. They shut down Moataz’s school. But they also dismantled many of the blast walls and checkpoints, giving a long-lost sense of freedom and dignity to many of the locals. Sunnis were allowed to be Sunnis again, without fear or shame. There were no more curfews. No more arrests. For Sunni families, ISIS didn’t behave like occupiers but rather like liberators. At least at first.
Then the fighters started taxing locals heavily. They clamped down with rules that started out strict and became draconian. They forced locals to work for ISIS, often with little or no pay. Anyone caught resisting could be killed. It wasn’t long before they were beheading people in the park.
As ISIS tightened its grip on the city, Moataz was growing old enough to start venturing out on his own. He gravitated toward the soccer field in his neighborhood. Soon he was going every day and joined a local team. Mohamed was encouraged to see his son developing a passion. They still went fishing together at the river sometimes, but he allowed Moataz to spend time playing soccer with his friends—it was one of the few pleasures still available under the occupation.
One morning, Mohamed realized he had made a grave mistake. He discovered it the way parents often stumble upon the vices of their teenagers: by going through his son’s phone. Moataz had left the phone out in the house. His father found videos of radical imams with long beards preaching violent jihad. There were photos of the black banner flown by ISIS. Along with the music of Western pop stars, there were ballads of jihadis singing about the glorious martyrs in the battles to come. Of all the things Mohamed could have found on his son’s phone, the ISIS propaganda seemed the most dangerous, because it was a clear sign his son was being radicalized. And if his son joined ISIS, he was as good as dead.
Mohamed tried to remain calm. When Moataz came into the kitchen he confronted him and told him what he had found. He warned that those men in the streets with the big beards and guns were not true Islam. The men preaching violence were not true Islam. He had seen enough of war. He told his son to stay away. And if any of his friends were preaching that nonsense, he should stay away from them, too. Moataz promised he would. But there was a look in his eyes, almost like he was hypnotized.
Moataz kept going to the soccer field to practice with friends. ISIS guys also hung out at the field, and Moataz would sometimes scrimmage with them. They were older but not nearly as old as his father. A lot of them had good moves with the ball. They were confident and cool. They were funny. The ISIS guys started taking some of the kids under their wing. They would offer tips on ball handling. They bought new shoes and jerseys and gave them to the boys. Moataz may not have known it, but he was being recruited.
ISIS had a program called “Cubs of the Caliphate” that recruited boys as young as nine. By the end of the battle in Mosul it was a forced conscription program that sent boys in suicide belts to their death. But in the beginning, it was more subtle. ISIS knew the battle was coming and it would need young, fit bodies to fight. The soccer field was the perfect place to find them.
ISIS put up posters around the field that celebrated their righteous stand against evil and played songs that celebrated the brave men who would defend the city. The ISIS guys would often talk about what it meant to be a good Muslim. Moataz considered himself pious, but the ISIS guys insisted it wasn’t enough to just pray each day. The Shias and the Americans were coming to take back the city. They would kill all of the Sunnis in Mosul. True Muslims had to stand up and fight not just for their religion but to protect their families. The enemies would kill their parents, rape their sisters. Men of God had to be willing to stand up and stop them.
One afternoon Mohamed went down to the soccer field to find his son and heard the songs and saw the posters. He saw the men giving out new shoes and filling kids’ heads with lies. He realized they were grooming his boy to become a fighter. He dragged Moataz away by the arm. He slapped him and told him to think.
“You are too young to get into this. Promise me you will stop,” Mohamed told him. “I need you to stay with me. We all need you with us. If you want to defend us then stay with us and help us through these difficult times.”
Moataz promised he would stay. But the soccer field, the draw of his friends, the draw of being able to do something and be someone important and heroic, was too much. It didn’t take long before he ran away to the soccer field again.
By 2017, the honeymoon of the ISIS occupation was long gone. The fighters increasingly clamped down on the people of Mosul. They kept demanding taxes even though the economy had collapsed. Mohamed’s car business had dried up. Electricity, water, and food were increasingly scarce. Mohamed realized he had made a mistake by not fleeing in the first days of the occupation, but it was too late. Anyone who tried to escape the city at that point was shot.
When Moataz ran away, Mohamed marched down to the soccer field and forced him to go back home. It was a risk. If ISIS saw he was interfering with recruiting, he could be beaten, even killed. But he was determined. If he couldn’t escape the city, at least he could try to keep his family together and alive until the fighting was over. He forbade his son again to go out and play soccer. And again, when his father wasn’t watching, Moataz ran away.
By that point it was the spring of 2017. The Iraqi Army had come to the edges of the city. The final battle was underway. Everywhere ISIS was preparing for the assault, digging trenches, welding suicide cars, and recruiting any young men they could find. The American fighter jets were screaming over the city. Acrid black smoke billowed from huge piles of burning tires. It was going to be a bloodbath. At seventeen, Moataz considered himself a man, but he didn’t really know how to take care of himself. He had never been out on his own. At the start of the year, he’d been injured in a bomb blast. Shrapnel just missed his head, clipping off the bottom piece of his right ear. If Moataz went into the trenches with ISIS, Mohamed had no doubt, he would soon end up dead.
Mohamed went out into the streets and found his son hanging out with his gang of soccer friends who had been tricked into thinking they were soldiers. He brought him home a third time. He was desperate to keep Moataz safe, so he chained him up in the house. But Moataz’s mind was made up. The more his father told him no, the more he was determined to fight. When no one was looking, Moataz used a kitchen knife to break the chain and slipped away. His family never saw him again.
The night he ran away for good was right around when the battle for western Mosul started in earnest. Helicopters and fighter jets circled above at all times, raining down bombs. Plumes of smoke wrapped the city in a black haze. The Iraqi Army launched unguided rockets into the neighborhoods that exploded at random. There was no escape. One morning a coalition bomb hit an electrical substation near the family house. The explosion blew in all the windows, showering the family with glass. They cowered in a corner, bleeding from the cuts, not knowing when the bombing would end. Around that time, Mohamed’s brother got caught in the crossfire between ISIS and Iraqi forces and was shot. Moataz was missing, but it was too dangerous to go out and look for him.
A few weeks after Moataz disappeared, two of his soccer friends came to Mohamed. They had seen him try to keep Moataz away from the field and considered him a traitor and an infidel. That day they didn’t try to hide their disgust. “Moataz is missing,” one of them said. “We think he was martyred during the battles.” The other scowled at Mohamed and said, “He died as a brave man, not as a coward.” Without saying more, they walked away.
Mohamed did not want to believe that his son had been killed, but he grudgingly accepted that it was almost inescapable. Death and destruction were all around. The city was in flames. People were getting killed every day, even while hiding in their houses. What chance did a seventeen-year-old have on the front lines?
Weeks went by with no word from Moataz. The fighting drew closer and closer to Mohamed’s home. The family stayed hidden inside. Then in May 2017, the front line of the fighting passed right down the family’s block. ISIS was beaten back, and Mohamed found his family suddenly liberated. For the first time in months they were able to go out and get food and clean water. They were also able to watch the news on TV, which had been forbidden under ISIS. Mohamed switched on Iraq’s most popular news channel, Al Iraqiya. He couldn’t believe what he saw. There on the screen, with a blue foam Al Iraqiya microphone pressed up to his face, was Moataz.
Mohamed leaned forward, listening closely. Moataz was laid out in the dirt on a street somewhere in Mosul. It was definitely him, right down to the injured right ear. One of Al Iraqiya’s combat correspondents was questioning him. It was the same video footage later sent to NCIS. Mohamed could tell by the way his son mumbled and struggled for breath that he was hurt, but at least he was alive. He listened to his son say that his father had beaten him and had told him not to go with ISIS, but he went anyway so they could tell him, “Good job.” He listened as the reporter then turned to the camera: “Dear viewers, here is a young man, about seventeen years old. ISIS fooled him into joining them and this is the result, he got injured during the battles. He was brought here by the heroes in ERD. They will take him to be hospitalized and then question him.”
Praise God, my son is alive! Mohamed thought. He could not contain his relief. In all the death and destruction, his son somehow had been spared. He would have to go to prison for what he had done. But one day he would get out and come home. He could live his life. He could have a family. Mohamed went to tell his wife. He was overjoyed.
The Battle of Mosul ended about eight weeks later. Mohamed kept searching the city for his son. He went to the hospitals and the Iraqi Army. He went to prisons and refugee camps. He never found him. Piece by piece Mosul started to rise from the rubble. Bulldozers cleared the roads and filled in craters. Shops began to reopen, and people came back to try to piece together their neighborhoods. Many of Moataz’s friends eventually went back to school. They got jobs. Some got married. Mohamed kept hoping that Moataz would one day appear at his door.
More than two years after Moataz disappeared, Mohamed read a local Iraqi news story about the trial in San Diego of the American who was accused of a number of killings in Mosul. They showed a photo of the boy the SEAL was accused of stabbing—a still from the Al Iraqiya video interview. It was Moataz.
Mohamed felt the world suddenly fall in on his chest. He had suspected for a long time that his son had been killed in the fighting. At times he had accepted it. He had tried to move on. But there was always some sliver of hope that Moataz was still alive. Learning he had been killed by an American after he had been taken captive tore a new wound in Mohamed’s heart. Why would anyone do that to a child? Certainly these Americans had children, they had to know what raising them is like. Mohamed expected that kind of brutality from ISIS and maybe even from some Iraqi forces. But he had always seen the Americans as more professional, more humane. They were supposed to be the good guys. Maybe, despite all their talk about democracy and rule of law, he thought, the Americans weren’t different from anyone else.
Leading up to the trial, Fox News and other media often portrayed Eddie and the unnamed fighter he’d killed as polar opposites. It was us versus them, the SEALs versus the terrorists, order versus chaos, good versus evil. And in such a black-and-white fight, some commentators questioned the wisdom of even trying to follow battlefield rules that showed mercy to the enemy.
In fact, Eddie and Moataz weren’t so different at all. It was their circumstances at key moments that seemed to make all the difference. Like Moataz, Eddie had also been a passionate soccer player in his teens. They both grew up in close families but chafed under their fathers’ rules as they got older. They both snuck around behind their fathers’ backs and got into trouble. They both were confronted by caring parents who warned them, scolded them, begged them to change their paths. And in both cases, the sons ignored the warnings. When both continued to get in trouble, their parents took desperate measures. That is where vast differences in resources and in geography offered the boys starkly different paths. Mohamed felt his only recourse was to chain his son in the house in a war-torn city; the Gallaghers sent Eddie to prep school in Connecticut.
Both efforts failed. Eddie was kicked out of prep school for fighting. Moataz broke his chain and escaped. Eddie went back to his hometown in Indiana and started hanging with a wild crowd. Moataz ran out into his neighborhood in western Mosul and joined up with the other young Sunnis who wanted to fight. Both were looking for a way out, a way to forge their manhood and prove their worth. Both thought the honorable way was through war. Both craved acceptance. They wanted to be told, “Good job.” Both chose combat. And in choosing combat, their paths diverged again: Eddie became a U.S. Navy SEAL, trained and mentored in the laws of armed conflict, schooled in the expectations of maximum lethality with minimum collateral damage to noncombatants, theoretically beholden to the Constitution. Moataz was taken in by violent radicals and got little if any training, only the assurance that God would help him against the Infidels. Two very different societies with very different expectations, but two men with a lot in common.
In the end what separated the two also brought them together—both were in Mosul fighting for what they saw as right, both felt their society and values were under attack, both were bent on destroying the other side. Of course the SEALs would bristle at the comparison. ISIS was nothing but a band of criminal marauders with no respect for individual rights. They didn’t abide by the Geneva Conventions or agree to the humane treatment of captives. They were savages. The United States had discipline, rules, and laws. Though the SEALs dealt in lethal force, just like ISIS, they did it on the side of order and decency. They were professionals with standards. They were the good guys.
But when Moataz was laid out wounded in the sun-bleached gravel, helpless, underage, gasping for breath, and Eddie pushed a knife into his neck, he threw away all that order and decency. He threw away discipline and standards. He threw away the ideals and aspirations that made the United States the United States. When he did that, Eddie was no longer really a SEAL. He had turned into a pirate who was no different from the ISIS fighters he despised.