I. Up the Tigris

When the campaign to expel the Islamic State from Mosul began, on October 17th, the Nineveh Province SWAT team was deployed far from the action, in the village of Kharbardan. For weeks, the élite police unit, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, had been patrolling a bulldozed trench that divided bleak and vacant enemy-held plains from bleak and vacant government-held plains. The men, needing a headquarters, had commandeered an abandoned mud-mortar house whose primary charm was its location: the building next door had been obliterated by an air strike, and the remains of half a dozen Islamic State fighters—charred torsos, limbs, and heads—still littered the rubble.

The SWAT-team members huddled around a lieutenant with a radio, listening to news of the offensive. The Kurdish Army, or peshmerga, was advancing toward Mosul from the north; various divisions of the Iraqi military were preparing a push from the south. More than a hundred thousand soldiers, policemen, and government-sanctioned-militia members were expected to participate in the fight to liberate Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. It had been occupied since June, 2014, and was now home to about six thousand militants from the Islamic State, or ISIS. The SWAT-team members were desperate to join the battle. They called relatives in Mosul, chain-smoked cigarettes, and excoriated the war planners, from Baghdad, who seemed to have forgotten them. Major Mezher Sadoon, the deputy commander, urged patience: the campaign would unfold in stages. At forty-six, he had a flattop and a paintbrush mustache that were equal parts black and gray. He had been shot in the face in Mosul, in 2004, and since then his jaw had been held together by four metal pins. The deformed bone caused his speech to slur—subtly when he spoke at a normal pace and volume (rare), and severely when he was angry or excited (often). Many villages surrounding Mosul had to be cleared before forces could retake the city, Mezher told his men. Holding out his hands, he added, “When you kill a chicken, first you have to boil it. Then you have to pluck it. Only after that do you get to butcher it.”

Few of the policemen seemed reassured by the analogy. They were hungry, and they’d been waiting to butcher this chicken for a long time. The SWAT team was created in 2008 and, in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces, conducted raids in Mosul to arrest high-value terrorism suspects. After the American withdrawal from the country, in 2011, the unit hunted down insurgents on its own.

In early 2014, ISIS attacked the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Falluja. Then, riding out of Syria in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns, the militants stormed Mosul. They had aspired merely to secure a couple of the city’s western neighborhoods, but they quickly reached the Tigris River, which snakes south through the middle of Mosul. Along the way, they overran several military bases, seizing the heavy weapons, armored vehicles, and ammunition depots inside them. The SWAT team, which at the time was based at a compound near the Mosul airport, consisted of roughly eighty men, only half of whom were on duty. As ISIS surged through the city, the commander of the SWAT team, Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, consolidated his troops in the Mosul Hotel, a ten-story terraced building on the western bank of the Tigris. The SWAT team held the position for four days, while the thirty thousand Army soldiers stationed in Mosul—nearly all of whom came from elsewhere in Iraq—ditched their weapons and fled. On the fifth day, a water tanker loaded with explosives detonated outside the hotel, killing three SWAT-team members and wounding twenty-five. Rayyan and the survivors retreated to the airport compound.

A detention facility next to the compound contained approximately nine hundred convicted terrorists, many of whom had been apprehended by the SWAT team. With the fall of Mosul imminent, Rayyan’s men loaded two hundred and fifty-six of the inmates into vans and spirited them out of the city. The captives they had to leave behind were freed by ISIS the next day. A week later, so were the two hundred and fifty-six, when the town to which Rayyan had transferred them also fell to ISIS.

In the areas it controls, ISIS typically offers Iraqi security forces a kind of amnesty by means of an Islamic procedure called towba, in which one repents and pledges allegiance to the Caliphate. But the SWAT team was not eligible for towba. “We had killed too many of them,” Rayyan told me. Some members of the force who had not been at the Mosul Hotel escaped to Kurdistan, but, among those who failed to make it out of the city, twenty-six were rounded up and executed.

Eventually, the chief of police for Nineveh Province, whose capital is Mosul, reconstituted his forces at a spartan base north of the city. Rayyan brought the remnants of the SWAT team there, and began enlisting new volunteers. Aside from martial aptitude, there were two principal requirements for recruits: they had to have been wounded by ISIS or its Islamist precursors—either physically, by bullets and blasts, or psychically, by the death of a loved one—and they had to crave revenge. “I had the idea that a unit like that would work in a real way,” Rayyan told me. If the implication was that other units’ commitment to the destruction of ISIS was less than sincere, Rayyan’s understanding of the distinction was personal. In 2005, his older brother Safwan had been gunned down by terrorists, and two of his fiancée’s brothers had been murdered. His father’s house had been blown up. He’d been shot in the leg and the chest and the hip. At his engagement party, gunmen had tried to shoot him a fourth time, and wounded his sister instead. More recently, ISIS suicide bombers had killed his brother Neshwan, a police officer, and abducted his brother Salwan, who had remained in Mosul. Rayyan didn’t know if Salwan was alive or dead.

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Shopping

For two years after Mosul fell, the front lines around the city remained relatively static, as the Iraqi military regrouped and clawed back ISIS-held territory closer to Baghdad. This past summer, Iraqi forces began reclaiming the mostly rural lands to the east and south of Mosul, laying the groundwork for an invasion. The SWAT team helped clear five villages. Then, to the unit’s frustration, it was sent out to Kharbardan, in a dust-bowl district of minimal strategic consequence. A few days after the campaign to liberate Mosul began, one officer, Lieutenant Thamer Najem, deserted his post when he learned that the Army was attempting to clear ISIS from the village where his mother and cousins lived. Thamer returned two days later with a story that confirmed each man’s worst anxiety. Four of his cousins had killed an ISIS fighter when they saw Iraqi infantry and tanks approaching. But the Army had stopped short of entering the village, and Thamer’s relatives were slaughtered.