They Will Have to Die Now Page 2

  In the approach to the battle against the jihadis for Mosul, which would lay waste that city like nothing since the Old Testament, Iraqi forces fought their way along Highway 2, taking it back mile by mile; once they breached the city, they were driven up and down Highway 2 on their way to and from the front lines. Just how many of these soldiers knew of the history they ferried over I could not say. I believed—at any rate I liked to tell myself, with the bad conscience of a man whose country was once again inserting itself into history it did not understand—they were more than, say, my friends in Brooklyn who know in which generals’ footsteps they follow when they go down Bedford Avenue. The older Iraqi soldiers, always eager to discuss history with me, history of any sort—Iraq’s, America’s, whosoever’s—they would have at one time known quite a lot, even if they’d since forgotten. They had been educated in the Baath era, when Saddam Hussein made Iraq one of the most literate countries in the world. He’d renovated ancient temples and palaces, too, and Iraqi schoolchildren were steeped in the glories of Mesopotamia, and alone in the world in that they read about the invention of cities and law and government and written language and then got to visit the places where these things were invented.

  As for the younger soldiers, it was anyone’s guess. They had grown up during the occupation, the American era. In school they might have studied the 2005 constitution, written in haste as the country descended into civil war. They might even remember its rousing preamble:

  We, the people of Mesopotamia, the homeland of the apostles and prophets, resting place of the virtuous imams, cradle of civilization, crafters of writing, and home of numeration. Upon our land the first law made by man was passed, and the oldest pact of just governance was inscribed, and upon our soil the saints and companions of the Prophet prayed, philosophers and scientists theorized, and writers and poets excelled.

  But that was only if they’d gone to school. Some had a few years, some none at all. Some, uprooted by the occupation or the civil war, when more than two-and-a-half-million Iraqis fled the country and another two million were internally displaced, had daydreamed as they listened to foreign do-gooders reciting from donated textbooks under the white tarpaulins of refugee camps. Some had spent their childhoods just wandering.

  As far as I could see, what knowledge the younger soldiers did have of Mosul and its history came from their cellphones. Facebook prophecies, WhatsApp conspiracy threads. History as conspiracy. The realest thing in this phone-world may have been the execution videos, uploaded and shared not just by jihadis and civilians but by soldiers, too—they were as prurient as everyone else watching this war, including me. Thanks to their phones, they did at least have a thorough understanding of Mosul’s geography, courtesy of a stupendously precise satellite mapping application that was updated daily by the command. They may have known nothing of what lay beneath the dirt and cobblestones on which they trod and onto which their blood spilled, but they could track their progress meter by meter.

  And it was by mere meters that the battle was progressing. The combat had begun October 16. It was the second week of November now. The battle map at CTS field headquarters, a wall-sized, more detailed version of the phone map, contained two very small polygons near the floor, corresponding to where you stood as you looked at it, in Mosul’s southeast corner. The polygons were crosshatched in blue, green, and red marker strokes, the colors corresponding to the sectors that had been seized by CTS, the 16th and 9th. The rest of the map, stretching to the top of the wall, showed the remainder of Mosul’s two hundred fifty-one neighborhoods. These sectors were still the charcoals, ashes, and nickels of satellite photography—a grayscale of entirely hostile terrain. Solid Caliphate.

  The battle plan was no secret: turn gray into color. The troops would take east Mosul, expanding out from Gogjali, clearing and occupying neighborhood by neighborhood, until they reached the Tigris. Then they would cross the Tigris and do the same thing in west Mosul. They would do this with small Humvee columns, armored personnel carriers and some tanks, but mostly on foot. Once they got into the city’s original neighborhoods, medieval-laned warrens, they would have to move entirely on foot.

  The command estimated the combat would take four to six months. Some commanders told me it could be done much faster—CTS had seized Fallujah in thirty-four days over the summer—and perhaps it could have been if the troops had treated all civilians as militants. Certainly there were commanders and men who wanted to take this approach. For them, every Moslawi was a jihadi and a traitor. Others told me clearing Mosul could require years. They pointed out it had taken eighteen months to dislodge the enemy from Ramadi, a city not half Mosul’s size.

  In addition to the military dead, almost thirty thousand Iraqi civilians had died in the war against the Islamic State, which at its height held most of northwestern Iraq, thousands of square miles. Three million people had been displaced. Whole swaths of countryside and whole cities lay in ruin. Fallujah was a ghost town. Ramadi was shattered. Long before it was over the war was being called Iraq’s second civil war, the first having been that of the mid-2000s. But this time around it was more complicated. This was a mongrel conflict, both civil war and invasion.

  What all the commanders could agree on, what every Iraqi knew, what the world knew by the time it began, was that the battle for Mosul would be that war’s climax. The city’s recapture would effectively mean the end of the Caliphate as a place if not the Islamic State as an idea. Mosul was the Caliphate’s prize possession, with between a million and two million inhabitants, wealthy, cosmopolitan, layered with history, beautiful in parts, home to one of Iraq’s most prestigious military academies and one of the region’s best universities. It had not been startling when the Islamic State had seized Raqqa, its self-proclaimed capital in Syria, a country in the midst of a civil war where several such groups claimed territory. When, in June of 2014, the jihadis had seized Mosul, however, a city at least five times the size of Raqqa, it was astonishing. We had entered a new epoch of war, just as surely as we had on September 11 thirteen years before. In Mosul, it was obvious, the jihadis would make their grand last stand. Smaller fights would follow, but this would be the show-stopper. It would be not just the biggest and most devastating battle of this war, but the biggest battle, in a sense the culminating battle, of what was once known as the War on Terror. When it was only half done, a Pentagon spokesman would call the fighting in Mosul ‘the most significant urban combat since WWII.’

  I was in Mosul when I read that. I had gone to Iraq for the first time in the summer of 2016 on assignment for National Geographic, to write about life in the Islamic State’s wake. I got a month-long visa. I ended up staying the better part of a year. Only later did I understand why. It wasn’t just to see the jihadis up close or to cover a war or to prove my mettle. No, the main impulse, I realized, many months into the battle, was a certain guilt. Shame, even. Though I never said it aloud to an editor or anyone else, maybe never so much as thought it explicitly, I knew I had to do penance. I had to do penance for being a coward and a hypocrite. I lived in New York in 2001, just out of college, and, at my first real newspaper job, I covered the destruction of the World Trade Center. I should have found a way to go to Afghanistan after that. I wanted to. A braver voice in me did, anyway. But I was too scared. Two years later, after attending one antiwar rally and writing some faintly damning things about the Bush administration, I watched American troops roll into Baghdad and Mosul from the comfort of my living room. Americans and Iraqis died in the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands, as Iraq was torn apart and tore itself apart. I was still a journalist, a conscience-stricken one, I liked to think, and I could have, I should have, gone to Iraq, but didn’t. Later, I took to reporting on war and conflict in other parts of the world, but still I avoided Iraq. Maybe I was still too scared, maybe too embarrassed about what my country had done there. But how do you write about war as an American and not write about the American war of your time? As an American writer of my age, how do you not face Iraq?

  So I went. I went to tell the stories of Iraqis, a people whom my people had invaded, had very nearly ruined, indeed had ruined in ways, as I would find; a people—civilians, soldiers, jihadis—now living and dying in a new and blacker war, a war with a foe at whose core was a death cult, yes, a war that emerged from centuries of history, yes, but a war that nevertheless would not be happening, at least not in this way, if not for the American war that preceded it. I had to write about this country whose story had been entwined with my country’s story for a generation now, for most of my life, so entwined that neither place any longer made sense without the other. That is what I tried to do in the pages of National Geographic and then The New York Times Magazine. And that is what I’ve tried to do in this book.

  A week after I met Ali at the triage station in Gogjali, I found myself late one night about a half-mile farther into Mosul, with a CTS company. CTS is made up of three roughly brigade-sized units of elite light infantry, each with several battalions and intelligence and support elements. The company I was with had fought its way into the neighborhood where we were now, Zahra, killing or driving out the jihadis and setting up a command post and barracks in a group of requisitioned homes surrounding Zahra’s central plaza. Most of the modest rowhouses in this lower-middle-class district of shopkeepers and pharmacists and taxi drivers had made it out of the fighting intact; others were crumpled but salvageable; others mere rubble. In the plaza were a mosque and a park, or what had been a park—now it was a stretch of mud where Humvees, an Abrams tank, an armored bulldozer, and a fuel tanker were parked.

  I should point out that while my articles and this book are composed of scenes, the experience of war is not. Experientially, war is ma
inly sound. In the news, in a movie, you see a war, but once amid a war, you mostly hear it. You listen to projectiles all day and night, but only rarely do you watch them leave a muzzle and even more rarely do you see impact. You’re usually sitting in some house or truck or squatting behind some berm, listening to the destruction. War is loud. Loud and listless. Quite dull, in fact. The scenes you’ll read in this book made up a miniscule portion of the time I spent in Mosul. The rest of the time I spent waiting. War consists largely of waiting for war, as it turns out, a fact that probably doesn’t come as news to you. The secret has been out at least since Troy, where a decade of bickering kings and lamb roasts amounted to a few weeks of fighting. ‘Big Mars seems bankrupt in their beggar’d host,’ the French at Agincourt whinged while waiting on Henry V, ‘The horsemen sit like fixed candlesticks.’ Or take Orwell: ‘Today or tomorrow or the day after you were going back to the line, and maybe next week a shell would blow you to potted meat, but that wasn’t so bad as the ghastly boredom of the war stretching out forever.’ Empty hours must cook off, years, to distill a few seconds of movement. The imbalance of inaction over action, of meaninglessness over meaning, is grievous, somehow, a kind of temporal wound. ‘Even deep in the bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring,’ Tim O’Brien said of Vietnam. ‘It was boredom with a twist that caused stomach disorders.’ And if the temporal imbalance of war sickens time, the sensory imbalance, the imbalance of sound over sight, at the same time robs it, telescopes it, collapses it. A half-second of half-consciousness carries the completion of another life. You barely catch the momentary wiping out of lineages. You’re a pointless prophet, overhearing enormities you can’t hope to understand.

  That night in Zahra, I stood in the plaza, listening as a polyphony of firefights came together around me. First was the reliable dialogue of the troops’ M-4s and the jihadis’ AKs. That was overlaid with the jihadis’ louder PKCs and the last-word metallic clangor of the troops’ Humvee-mounted 50-cals. Over the guns came the curt percussive peals of rocket-propelled grenades.

  I climbed to a roof, ducked below the parapet so as not to create a silhouette for the enemy snipers, who had night-vision equipment but were good enough not to need it, and peeked over. Mosul is situated in a riverine basin and a high perch can give you a view over much of it. Tracer bullets arced over the roofs. Fires burned around the city in a necklace of throbbing orange-red. There was little moonlight and the edges of the buildings were revealed by incandescence. Looking onto this hellish cityscape, Bosch’s Last Judgment, with its fiery twilight tortures, came inevitably to mind. Then the mind leapt to the images that had led to this war, the art of this surpassingly artistic enemy, its own scenes of torture so minutely and stylishly documented and instantaneously broadcast to the world, videos much worse than viral, of firing squads and beheadings and dismemberments and forced drownings and burnings-alive, of sex slaves, of triumphant city-taking columns, black banners fluttering across the landscape, images that outraged the world almost as much as they titillated and petrified it.

  A ghoulish chorale crept into the gunfire. The jihadis were baying from mosque loudspeakers.

  ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’

  Others shouted the phrase from the streets. From more loudspeakers came a nasheed, an Islamic State anthem. I asked a soldier how it was that the same song was coming from different places in perfect unison. He pulled from his fatigues a pocket radio. He tuned it to 92.5 FM and turned up the volume. The nasheed played.

  ‘Daesh’s radio station,’ he explained.

  I awoke with the troops before dawn. Their mission this morning was to assist in the assault on an enemy-held neighborhood to the north. The company commander, a major, had found a house whose roof afforded a good vantage onto the route in. On the floor of the main room were what appeared in the darkness to be long bolts of fabric. Only when the major daintily stepped around them, indicating with his hand not to talk, did I see this was in fact the family who lived here, huddled under layers of quilts, sleeping together in the center of the house so as to be as far as possible from the exterior walls and windows should they be blown out during the night.

  The major’s company had distinguished itself fighting the Islamic State in Ramadi and Fallujah. He had become a celebrity on nightly newscasts and a folk hero on YouTube, and was afforded certain perks by the high command, including the use of a small surveillance drone. It was so small that it could be carried in a backpack by a sergeant who, after sustaining one injury too many, had decided he could be of more use as the major’s adjutant. On the roof, the sergeant, Karim, removed the drone, an insect-like quadcopter, from the backpack and explained to me that the machine used to belong to the Islamic State. The company had found it. Karim had never used a drone but was a hand with computers and gadgetry and soon mastered it. Once he had it hovering above us, he handed the controller to the major. As ash dangled from his cigarette, falling and collecting in the fold of a pantleg, the major minutely moved the knob of the controller, flying the drone slowly northward and studying the feed from its camera on the small screen. He saw that the enemy had put up roadblocks.

  The sunrise was threaded through with black smoke from the car fires the jihadis had lit to try to obscure their positions from surveillance. The futility of this could be heard and felt every few minutes, as a jet dove in to drop a bomb or an artillery shell found its target, with a sky-consuming shriek and a thunderous, intestine-seizing impact. Yet the jihadis set the cars ablaze every day.

  On the street below, the Abrams tank and the armored bulldozer were parked ahead of two Humvee columns. Locals emerged from their houses, at first tentatively, then more confidently, as they found the fighting was not hard upon them, as it had been the day before, but sounding out from nearby. Parents sent their children to make tea for the soldiers. They brought bread, sweets, whatever they could spare. The soldiers shared their cigarettes, still a precious commodity in newly liberated parts.

  A lieutenant smoked with a man as they sat on the low wall outside the man’s home.

  ‘Maybe I can join the army or police one day,’ the man said.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked the lieutenant.

  ‘I was born in 1983.’

  ‘I think you’re too old. They wouldn’t make you an officer. Three years to become an officer in the police, two for the army.’

  ‘When Saddam was here, the system was different.’

  A Humvee pulled up to the curbside. A general stepped from it and ascended to the roof. The major briefed him. The general gave the order to move. The engines coughed to life. The columns would have to cross a wide boulevard to access Tahrir, the neighborhood coming under assault. The general had learned the hard way that unless he took precautions, the jihadis could easily steer their vehicle-born improvised explosive devices—mobile car bombs, essentially, driven by soon-to-be-suicides—into his columns. The columns were particularly vulnerable on wide throughways like this boulevard.