They Will Have to Die Now
Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The battle is for a city. The war is for history.
In autumn 2016, Iraqi forces began operations to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. Millennia-old, Mosul was a birthplace of Western culture but also infamous for its cruelty, from the Assyrians to Saddam Hussein. Through the eyes of soldiers and families and jihadis, award-winning reporter James Verini chronicles the combat that followed.
Among the most devastating urban conflicts since World War II, the battle for Mosul was both archaic and modern. Troops and jihadis fought house by house, block by block, matching bullet for bullet, while co-ordinating their movements on WhatsApp and uploading execution videos. Verini describes how this viciously contested patch of earth came to represent a war for the soul of a country, for its history and its future.
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Journalist Verini debuts with a vivid chronicle of the 2016 battle to recapture Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, from the Islamic State. Noting that "in wartime, truth is inseparable from rumor, and in Iraq, history is always cut with conspiracy," Verini sketches the millennia of global conflicts that have shaped Mosul, from its founding as the Assyrian capital of Nineveh to its conquests by, among others, Alexander the Great, Sulamein the Magnificent, and U.S. Army general David Petraeus. For Mosul's citizens, Verini says, international fears of a terrorist caliphate obscured a raft of more quotidian concerns, including the Islamic State's "galling" ban on smoking. Reporting from the front lines, Verini documents how an unlikely coalition of Iranian-aligned militias, American special forces, Iraqi army units, and Kurdish Peshmerga collaborated to free the city after two and a half years of ISIS dominion. Shia militiamen, Verini writes, "looked as though they'd been kitted out at some urban unisex martial athleisure boutique," while his fellow foreign correspondents' "shallowly shocking coverage existed somewhere on the same spectrum as the Caliphate's own blood-porn." Readers interested in war journalism and Iraq's future prospects will be drawn to Verini's sardonic humor and sharp eye for detail.
