Two months ago, Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish regional government, held a press conference on a hill overlooking Sinjar, a town in the northwestern corner of Iraq. The day before, following an intense bombardment by American warplanes, Kurdish forces had taken control of Sinjar for the first time since they were routed from it by the Islamic State, or ISIS, in August of 2014. As smoke plumes and helicopters ascended behind him, Barzani, standing at a podium of sandbags, declared the town “liberated.”

After a retinue of bodyguards spirited the President away in a sport-utility vehicle, the foreign correspondents and local journalists headed down the hill to view the damage. On the outskirts of Sinjar the road became impassable: damaged, clogged with military trucks, and littered with debris. My interpreter and I parked and continued on foot. The town, once home to a hundred thousand people, was devastated. ISIS had killed or displaced nearly all the inhabitants, most of whom belonged to Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority. It had burned down their houses, looted their shops, and blown up their shrines. Whatever remained the American air strikes had destroyed.

A lone man with a rifle seemed to know where he was going. We hurried to catch up with him.

“I’m checking on my uncle’s house,” he said.

His name was Azad—he wouldn’t give his family name—and he told us he grew up in Sinjar. When ISIS began seizing territory in eastern Syria and then across northern Iraq, two summers ago, troops with the Iraqi Kurdish armed forces, or peshmerga, were deployed in the town. That June, ISIS captured Mosul—the second-largest city in the country, eighty miles to the east—yet most residents still felt safe. But when ISIS moved into Sinjar the peshmerga withdrew. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Azad and his family were among some fifty thousand Yazidis who escaped into the Sinjar Mountains, a thirty-mile-long range that looms above the town. Most of the refugees were evacuated by helicopter or relocated to camps farther north, but many of them, including Azad’s family, chose to remain amid the frigid peaks, living in tents with little food or water, waiting for the day when they could return to their homes.

“That’s it,” Azad said. He nodded toward a narrow building with blown-out windows, a sagging roof, and caved-in walls. The ground floor had been a shop. Its metal shutter lay on the sidewalk in a heap, like unfurled cloth.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

Azad looked around. It was getting dark.

“Go back up the mountain,” he said. He turned and walked away.

Nearby, on the roadside, a paunchy, important-looking man was addressing a group of thin, less important men. When we approached, he introduced himself as the mayor of Sinjar. As he elaborated on his credentials—he was also a parliamentarian, an engineer, and a military commander—a group of Iraqi police officers appeared. The mayor hailed them.

“Be careful,” he told the officers. “A lot of these buildings have not been cleared. We have information that there are still some ISIS fighters hiding in them.”

That night, we camped in the mountains. Early the next morning, as we navigated the ninety-three hairpin turns that led down to the town, it was easy to appreciate Sinjar’s strategic importance: Highway 47, a two-lane asphalt road, passes straight through the town’s center. Thirty miles to the east is Tal Afar, an ISIS stronghold where camps are believed to hold hundreds of captives; fifty miles past Tal Afar is Mosul. To the west, the highway leads to Syria. Before the peshmerga operation, Highway 47 had linked Raqqa, the largest city in Syria held by ISIS, to Mosul. Now ISIS would have to rely on an onerous network of secondary routes through the deserts to the south.

In town, the main roads had been cleaned up, and we were able to drive several miles past the southern outskirts, to a village called Domiz, where bulldozers and backhoes were digging new trenches, heaping the red soil into high berms. An expanse of untended fields stretched beyond them. There were villages out there, too: vague compounds, water tanks, radio towers.

“All of that belongs to ISIS,” a peshmerga general said. “Last night, we found three of them. We shot at them, but they got away.”

An explosion erupted nearby, and then gunfire. Soldiers grabbed weapons and ran into a dense collection of buildings behind us. We followed to a large house surrounded by dozens of peshmerga troops. Everyone was shouting. Shots burst inside the house.

“He still has a gun!” someone yelled. “He’s still alive!”

“Get out of there! He might blow himself up!”

A man on the second-floor balcony of a building across the street hoisted a grenade-launcher onto his shoulder. “I can kill him with this,” he said.

“No! No! No! We have men in there!”

The man set down the launcher, shrugged.

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A crowd had assembled around the entrance to the house. An older officer wearing sunglasses emerged. “Make way, make way,” he said. Eventually, two soldiers in desert fatigues hauled out a battered man by his ankles. A gray tunic was bunched around his neck, and he was covered with blood. On his leg was an improvised bandage. He had black shoulder-length hair and a long beard. His eyes, wide open, were blue; his arms splayed behind him as he was dragged on his back into the street.

“Fuck his sister!”

“Long live the peshmerga! Long live Barzani!”

A soldier in a patrol cap bent down and touched the man with the backs of his fingers, as if checking him for fever. He gave a thumbs-up.

“Still alive.”

Everyone had his phone out and was taking pictures.

“Get one of me,” one soldier said. He handed off his phone, squatted beside the dying man, and spat in his face. “Did you get it?”

“Call an ambulance,” someone said. “We want him alive.”

“Let’s fuck him up,” another suggested.

“No, we don’t do that. That’s not our way.”

After several minutes, a backhoe arrived, and the man was loaded into its bucket. We all followed the machine to the trench, where it dumped him on the grass. More pictures were taken. It seemed likely now that the man was dead, although at some point someone asked, “Where’s the doctor? Isn’t he coming?”

No one seemed to hear.

Such intimate encounters with the enemy are rare in northern Iraq. In December, three hundred miles to the south of Sinjar, a coalition of Iraqi forces and tribal fighters recaptured Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, a notoriously violent province west of Baghdad. It was the largest city anywhere to be taken back from ISIS. But Iraq’s northern front has remained relatively static. Tens of thousands of Kurdish troops man fixed positions along six hundred miles of trenches connecting Syria to Iran. In some spots, the gap between ISIS and the Kurdish regional government is measured in kilometres; in others, metres. One peshmerga unit near Erbil, the Kurdish capital, occupies a high ridge that overlooks an ISIS-held town.