“This is nothing,” he said. “It’s air. I like the sound of it.”

Finally, the order was given. The night before the assault, Arif’s troops gathered on the mountain above Bashiqa, in their old position. Ahmed and his cousin Ali were part of group of about 30 men who would descend the slope and enter Bashiqa on foot. In the morning, an armored column collected on a road outside the city. Sihad Barzani arrived to wish them luck.

“We must move, but slowly,” he said.

For six hours, the column crept toward the city, while airstrikes and artillery pummeled it. As they waited, soldiers checked for news of the American election, the next day, on their phones. Word came down that a sniper was holed up somewhere inside. He had already killed one soldier and wounded four.

On the access road into the city’s east end, which climbed up the mountainside, the column drove by a pesh merga bulldozer in flames, the driver incinerated in the cab. As in Omar Qapchi, the streets were quiet. But as the vehicles turned by a small park, a rocket-propelled grenade flew at it. Its orange fireball and white smoke trail, visible for less than a second, were terribly beautiful. The rocket exploded against the low concrete wall of the park. Another quickly followed behind it.

The column made it to a central plaza. A handsome old church with a suspicious tower was peppered with machine-gun fire and artillery. Jamil Rashid hopped from the front seat of a truck and took up a position outside the church. Standing in the open, his rifle dangling by his leg, he looked around and breathed in the scent of gun smoke, beaming.

The column turned back along the same road it had entered. But now there was an empty white sedan in the middle of an intersection. Was this a car bomb? A roadblock? Had some innocent tried to flee and suffered a breakdown? The driver of the lead tank stuck his head from the turret hatch. A shot cracked the air, its tone higher and sharper than that of a Kalashnikov. Blood sprayed from the driver’s head. He slumped over the turret. His crew mates began screaming and crying. Panic passed down the line. “Sniper! Sniper!” The column reversed course, honking and rear-ending, and labored back to the plaza. The tank sped from the city by a different route. At the staging point, the driver’s body was lifted out and put in an ambulance. His friends bent over the tank’s side skirt and knelt in the dirt, weeping.

Before the driver was shot, Ahmed, Ali and their detachment had descended into the same side of the city on foot. They came under fire, retreated back uphill and took up a position. A high-pitched crack. Ali lurched forward, falling over Ahmed’s leg. Ahmed thought his cousin had tripped. Then he saw the blood.