They Will Have to Die Now Read online

  THEY

  WILL

  HAVE

  TO DIE

  NOW

  MOSUL AND THE FALL OF THE CALIPHATE

  JAMES VERINI

  To Aya, Amina, Maha, Zainab, Zina, Clementine, and Vivian.

  I’m sorry for the world we’re giving you.

  Please help us make it better.

  And to Christopher Hitchens.

  You were wrong about Iraq, but right about

  most everything else.

  Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It is eleven eighty-three and we’re barbarians. How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we’re the origins of war. Not history’s forces nor the times nor justice nor the lack of it nor causes nor religions nor ideas nor kinds of government nor any other thing. We are the killers: we breed war. We carry it, like syphilis, inside.

  —ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE IN The Lion in Winter

  CONTENTS

  I.Zahra

  II.Nineveh We Are Coming

  III.They Will Have to Die Now

  A Note on Methods, Translation, Style, and Sources

  I

  ZAHRA

  I have come forth alive from the land of purple and

  poison and glamour,

  Where the charm is strong as the torture, being

  chosen to change the mind

  —G.K. CHESTERTON

  Two weeks into ground operations to recapture Mosul, Iraqi troops breached the city limits, fighting their way in through a series of suburbs and neighborhoods in the southeast. But for another few weeks after that they could go no farther on the main access road into east Mosul than a hill on the city’s outer rim. On the crest of the hill, astride the road, Islamic State fighters had lathered an embankment of rubble and scrap. By the time you noticed the embankment and its impassibility, bullets were already flying overhead. Then you noticed, between you and the embankment, a panorama of what would happen if you insisted on continuing forward. To the right of the access road was the apartment building from which the bullets flew and, to its left, a cemetery.

  It was the fall of 2016, and the jihadis had been fighting on the back foot long enough that they knew a good defensive position when they saw one. They were understandably reluctant to give up the apartment building, really more of a complex of buildings, as you learned when you got a better look at it, and as perfect in its quiet ugly menace as it was in its situation. It overlooked not just the access road but some of the districts into which the troops were trying to push. From the buildings’ many exterior planes of sickly pebbledash and rust-stained stucco protruded balconies and roofs, a dealer’s choice of positions in which the Islamic State fighters set up machine-gun emplacements and snipers’ nests. The Iraqi troops would hose down the outside of an apartment with 50-caliber fire, or send a grenade into a window, and then another jihadi would appear in another window returning fire. The Islamic State had been in fighting retreat for over a year, had ceded most of its ground in Iraq, and yet here the jihadis still were, popping up, shooting back when not shooting first. If you couldn’t admire their pluck, you had to marvel at it.

  Why those buildings weren’t reduced to rubble with ordnance I never learned. The international coalition backing the Iraqi ground forces was flying sorties day and night over Mosul and a constellation of artillery firebases surrounded the city. Some mornings the strikes were constant, making the whole city quake, the atmosphere pulse and bellow. Most likely the jihadis were keeping the apartments stocked with civilians. They did this. When they couldn’t get enough Moslawis to serve as human insulation and cannon fodder they imported them from surrounding villages, and the invisible presence of who knew how many innocents inside the apartment complex added to its menace. The place was ominous in the literal sense. It issued omens of an extensive, filthy, many-angled fight. It was the sort of frowning pile you had to see only once to think ‘Well of course armed zealots would be shooting at me from there.’

  The Iraqi troops had, with great effort and bloodshed, established a small headland of control in a district to the north of the access road, beyond the reach of the gunmen in the apartments. To get to this district their convoys took a right off the road about a hundred meters downhill from the embankment, onto a partially paved side street that quickly degenerated into a dirt track. The neighborhood into which they drove, Gogjali, was as poor as Mosul got. About four hundred miles north of Baghdad, Mosul is the capital of the governate of Nineveh, the agricultural heartland of Iraq. On the Tigris, which bisects Mosul into its eastern and western halves, and near the borders of Turkey and Syria, the city has been a hub of trade, licit and illicit, for centuries. The results can be seen in Mosul’s many mansions and its beautiful marble-and-tile mosques. Gogjali’s mosque was a cinderblock box, its narrow streets unpaved, the privacy walls of its one-story houses still mudbrick. It had been one of the first neighborhoods seduced by the jihadis, you heard. When the Islamic State’s clandestine recruiters had started approaching Moslawis, whispering about an impending takeover, they had made short work of winning over people here. Look at those big houses down the hill nearer the river. You can live in one of those if you join us.

  Gogjali was now the beginning of the rear on the eastern front, the only battle front in Mosul where the fighting was steady. The Iraqi 9th Division, armored and stodgy and questionable, was probing tentatively about the city’s southeastern edge, and the better but not entirely dependable 16th was somewhere closer by, while the federal police and paramilitary forces were stirring around. But it was here in the east that the special forces formation leading the invasion of Mosul, the Counter-Terrorism Service, had put the first real puncture in the Islamic State’s defenses. It was through this puncture that the main part of the Iraqi infantry, ten thousand strong, was trickling and would soon pour. The Islamic State had started life as an insurgency, using insurgent tactics, but now it was a regime, a government, even, in its way; it held territory, it had in Mosul Iraq’s second or third most populous city (depending on who did the counting), and now it would have to fight a conventional battle over territory, one government versus another.

  Gogjali was also home to what, in those early days of the battle, was the Iraqi troops’ only frontline triage station. What few CTS medics there were had taken over an abandoned home and an adjoining vacant lot. Every morning they set up shop in the lot, carrying out their gurneys and rolls of gauze and squeeze bottles of iodine and IV kits, most of it donated by foreign charities.

  Early one morning, the front line was just beyond the triage station. The pounding of airstrikes and artillery and the chatter of gunfire reverberated through the pall of dust and smoke and moist haze—the rainy season was beginning. The procession of casualties into the lot was already incessant. I arrived as a civilian caught in a shelling was carried in. He was put on a gurney. In moments, he was dead. His brother collapsed onto the body, weeping and hollering. He flung himself to the ground, still weeping and hollering and now smacking himself.

  A CTS squad had been ambushed. A pair of bloodied soldiers lay on stretchers, too dazed to take note of the mourner writhing in the dirt beside them. A major was carried in by his limbs by four of his men as blood pumped from a gunshot wound in the rear of his thigh. Though clearly in excruciating pain, when a medic went to roll up the major’s sleeve in order to put in an IV, the major got it in his mind the man was trying to lift his watch and he sat up, wheezing and flailing his arms in protest. In the late morning, the fighting quieted as the jihadis went to mosque. This happened every day, but on Fridays the lull was longer and particularly inauspicious. On Fridays the Islamic State imams gave sermons.

  ‘On Fridays, Daesh figh
ts well,’ a soldier watching the scene with me said, using the Arabic term for the group.

  In the early afternoon, the firefights resumed. An enemy sniper set to work. Like most Islamic State snipers, he was good. A soldier was brought in with half his jaw shot off. He was followed by a man with a long, shallow red groove through his pate, and he by two more men with head shots, both close to death. The Humvees skidded into the lot one after another, sending up a dust cloud that hung among the medics and patients.

  Journalists gathered. The writers hung on the periphery but the photographers swarmed around the gurneys. The Iraqi troops hated having their casualties photographed. A photographer approached a wounded man. A soldier told the photographer, calmly, ‘Take that picture and I will burn your vehicles.’

  In came a Humvee full of soldiers whose torsos and legs were punctured with shrapnel from an RPG; a man with a sucking chest wound; another with his left hand blown off, the shattered fibula jutting from the shreds of his wrist.

  ‘When we move forward, they fight. But this number of injured, for going forward, this is nothing. We’re doing good,’ said the soldier watching with me. Like many CTS soldiers, who were trained by Americans, he spoke English, and like most of them he had an excellent and dark sense of humor. His name was Ali.

  ‘Fuck this imam,’ Ali added. He said it without anger. It was more of a tactical suggestion.

  Young and reedy, with glinting blue eyes, Ali made no more pretense of helping with the wounded than I did. There was nothing to be done, but still you felt useless. We reclined against a wall, on a quilt, smoking the thin Turkish cigarettes the troops favored, looking on at the carnage. A bemused grin suggested itself on the corners of Ali’s mouth with each new load of casualties.

  ‘How do you think the battle’s going?’ I asked him.

  ‘For me? Nothing. I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Just I care about my family. I don’t care about Iraq. It didn’t give me anything.’

  Looking at the refugees filing past the triage station, I pointed out that he at least had a job. The stupidity of this occurred to me only as the words left my mouth. It was like saying, ‘Well you’ve got your health.’

  ‘Because they don’t have anyone else to employ in this fucking job!’ he said. ‘But we die every day, like five times.’

  Bad but salvageable cases were carried from the lot into the carport of the home, where an American medic worked on them. Many Americans had, in the past few years, volunteered to help the militias fighting the jihadis in the rural border regions of Iraq and Syria, and now a few had found their way into Mosul. The volunteers included soldiers of fortune, Evangelical Christians, thrill-seekers, lost souls, even some combat veterans, and very occasionally—the only ones of any real use—medics. Some had taken a course, invested a lot of money in tourniquets, and flown over. A few really knew what they were doing. The American medic in Gogjali knew what he was doing. Like most of the volunteers, he was a loud buffoon, whom you could find by night drunkenly mouthing off in the hotel bars back in the Kurdish city of Irbil, where the journalists and aid workers and the other hangers-on lived, but he was a large-hearted, loud buffoon, and devoted, and he saved a lot of lives in that carport.

  This didn’t make the Iraqi military’s attitude toward its wounded any less careless by the coalition’s standards. There were far too few Iraqi corpsmen to attach them to individual combat platoons, or even companies, and anyway the idea would have been superfluous, almost laughable. The Iraqi philosophy, stated often, was: people die in war. That’s what war is for. Anyone not ready to die shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t just the predictably callous philosophy of the high command; infantrymen held it too, and especially the infantrymen of CTS, who had been through enough that, though you doubted their judgment, you couldn’t question the sincerity of their fatalism. Since the Islamic State had begun seizing land in Iraq, in the first days of 2014, over twenty thousand Iraqi troops had died.

  A week earlier, Ali told me, his company had been ambushed. Four dead, thirty-five injured, twelve Humvees totaled. They were pinned down all night. The jihadis who had them surrounded never let up yelling what they’d do to the soldiers once they were caught. At 3 a.m., the company ran out of ammunition. Ali wasn’t scared of dying, he said, but ‘I was scared of them taking me alive. So I spared a bullet. I call it—we call it, all of us—a bullet mercy. A mercy bullet. When you are surrounded, you kill yourself.’

  They were finally rescued the next afternoon. The Americans had been no help, he complained. Here were, at the very least, a detachment of the 101st Airborne, planes, helicopters, drones, god only knew how many Special Forces commandos, and none of them had come to his company’s aid. What had we given him? A mouthy amateur surgeon in a carport.

  ‘Why you didn’t shoot them?’ he asked me. ‘You just watching. You say I want to fight them. Why you don’t fight them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ was all I could think to say. Ali shrugged.

  As we talked, Moslawis in their hundreds walked by the triage station. Families, groups of families, whole city blocks’ worth of families. They were leaving the neighborhoods where the fighting was heaviest, where ordnance was tearing apart the buildings and pavement and bullets and grenades everything else. As they walked they were trailed by shell bursts—enemy artillerists considered them fair game for abandoning the Caliphate. I looked down a dirt road. Behind a fleeing group, a mortar round came in with that unmistakable quick, high whistle. As the shell burst cracked the air and an earthen plume surged up, the refugees didn’t scatter, didn’t even cower much, but just accelerated into a trot, and then, a few seconds later, the violence spent, the plume descending, slowed back to a walk.

  The men dragged trolley bags and carried on their backs grain sacks they’d turned into rucksacks. The women clutched bursting handbags. They waved halved broomsticks and lengths of plastic piping tied with white cloths to signal to the soldiers their docility. The old and sick were in wheelchairs and wheelbarrows, carried on backs. The dead were pushed on handcarts and donkey wagons, laid out on their backs and wrapped in quilts. Not just calm, many of these refugees were serene, somehow, particularly the children, who smiled, skipped, pulled at their parents’ hands as though a giant playground were in sight. Maybe they were euphoric with safety, maybe they were enjoying the adventure. It was an astonishing sight and impossible to see without immediately admiring—no, revering—their resilience.

  I asked Ali why he stayed, if he didn’t care about the war.

  ‘Just to feed my family. And sometimes, sometimes when I see civilians, I say to myself, my job is good. I say, I’m doing good, I’m saving lives. In Qayara, I just cried. I saw they were happy and I thought, I’m saving these fucking lives, goddamnit. But only sometimes. If I had the chance, I’d leave Iraq.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  I pointed out that none of the wounded soldiers being brought into the triage station were wearing flak jackets or helmets. Nor was Ali. Well-trained and experienced though CTS was, its men had no interest in protective gear. It was the same attitude that made them disregard medical care. God decided your fate, not you, not your materiel. If it was your day, it was your day.

  ‘This,’ he said, poking my flak jacket with a finger as though it were as meaningful as a satin sleep mask. ‘This can’t help you.’

  Ingresses into Gogjali were few, and almost every vehicle that passed in—every Humvee, every tank, every armored personnel carrier and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, every freight truck, bulldozer, pickup, earthmover, gas tanker, flatbed—had to rumble along that same track off the access road, shaking the mudbrick walls and the shoddy homes behind them. All day every day, children rushed from courtyards up to the vehicles to wave and cheer the troops on. One girl, who appeared to live with a gaggle of siblings and cousins, was particularly enthusiastic. She was maybe five years old, undernourished but sturdy, a terrific bouncer, with bra
ve, matted hair and a purple turtleneck whose plush material did fascinating things with the dust thrown up from the wheels, which were taller than she and which she got much too close to for my liking. I would wave and smile and then put my hand flat and still, imploring her to not get so near our truck, with no effect.

  What did she know of what was happening to her city, to her country? Did it matter? She was alive. She was smiling. She became a kind of lucky mascot for me and my colleagues. ‘There she is,’ we’d say, happy to see that her family’s house still hadn’t been shelled and that she still had all her limbs.

  From the vehicle windows, soldiers tossed to her and the other children sleeves of crackers, tinned sardines, bottled water, canned cheese (which exists), sometimes whole ration boxes with all of those things and cooking oil and sugar besides. The most common present, though, was khubz, the dense white bread that Iraqis eat with most meals and that poorer Iraqis, and now the refugees walking out of Mosul, and likely too the jihadis, took as their only meals. Some days it seemed the whole war was fueled by khubz. The loaves were as ubiquitous as ammunition. They materialized on the battlefield every noon, folded, steaming in plastic bags that sprang up like mushroom patches on command-post sofas, in Humvee seats, on curbsides, stairwell treads, wall copings. Alongside the invasion of men, an invasion of bread. When the troops pulled out from a position you’d see khubz crusts everywhere, hardened, moldering, wet with rain or urine, doing low duty with the shell casings and cinderblock shards.

  On maps of Iraq, the access road into east Mosul is Highway 2. It existed long before acquiring that label. With reasonable confidence we can say it has been there since the sixth millennium before Christ. Mosul encompasses the remains of ancient Nineveh, the last capital of the Assyrian empire, the largest and most populous empire of its day—the early first millennium B.C.—and, thanks to the Hebrew Bible, among history’s most indelible villains. Highway 2 was then an imperial road connecting Nineveh to the Zagros Mountains of what is today Iraqi Kurdistan. The Assyrian warrior-kings rode it in order to worship at the temple city that Irbil then was, consecrated to Ishtar, goddess of war and love, or to hunt the lions and elephants that once dwelt in the Zagros foothills and the Nineveh plain, or to murder and enslave the mountain peoples from whom the Kurds descend. Later, Babylonian troops marched down it. They were followed by the armies of Alexander the Great—some ancient historians have the Macedonian conqueror defeating the Persians in Nineveh, others in Irbil. Alexander may be buried in northern Iraq. After Greeks, Romans. A millennium on, Saladin came this way to do battle with the Crusaders, and he was followed by the Mongol hordes. Then Suleiman the Magnificent, and Marco Polo, who mistakenly believed Mosul was still a great imperial capital, and Lawrence of Arabia, and the pilots of Hermann Göring’s Fliegerführer Irak, and General David Petraeus.