They Will Have to Die Now

September 23, 2019
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.