170 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
ANNE BARNARD is a reporter at The New York
Times, where she was Beirut Bureau Chief from
2012 to 2018. Earlier, she served as Baghdad
Bureau Chief and Middle East Bureau Chief at
The Boston Globe.
How a Caliphate
Ends
On the Frontline o the Fight
Against ISIS
Anne Barnard
They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and
the Fall of the Caliphate
BY JAMES VERINI. Norton, 2019,
304 pp.
T
he origin story that James Verini
tells about his new book, They
Will Have to Die Now, is about
guilt—his guilt for not having gone to
Iraq earlier. On 9/11, in his Ärst newspa-
per job, he covered the collapse o the
Twin Towers. He writes that a couple o
years later, he “could have, should have,
gone to Iraq but didn’t.” He was, he
says, “too scared.”
It’s just as well that Verini waited
until 2016 to “face Iraq” and start
reporting on what he calls the central
American war o our time. For one thing,
obviously yet still shockingly, even
arriving 13 years late, he didn’t miss it.
For another, he eventually learned a key
lesson for a reporter: being scared
doesn’t make you the wrong person for
the job. Verini’s deeply reported,
beautifully written Ärst-person account
results from many months on an
extremely dangerous assignment. To
cover the pivotal Äght to dislodge the
Islamic State, or , from Mosul, a
city o one million to two million
people in northern Iraq, he embedded
with Iraqi government troops, who, for
all the years, money, and lives that
Washington spent training them as U.S.
proxies, tend to be cheerfully uninter-
ested in basic force-protection measures
such as setting perimeters and over-
watch points.
Arriving late also means seeing the
conÁict with fresh eyes. Many American
journalists o my generation who shipped
out to Central Asia and the Middle East
after President George W. Bush’s declara-
tion o the dubiously named “war on
terror” are now pushing two decades on
the beat. The intervening years have
brought distance—even freedom, i one
dares use that Iraq-war-tainted word—
from the post-9/11 confusion in which
“America, in its fear, in its shame,” as
Verini writes, attacked Iraq. The original
sin o the U.S. invasion and the mis-
takes o the occupation that we reported
on are now, while not beside the point,
almost as distant from today as the
Vietnam War was from the United
States’ Ärst Iraq adventure, in 1990–91.
Verini thus arrives in medias res to a
country “whose story,” he writes, “had
been entwined with my country’s story
for a generation now, for most o my life,
so entwined that neither place any longer
made sense without the other.” True,
although most Americans fail to think
much about the war’s eects on their own
country. Iraqis do not have that luxury.
In today’s Iraq, American intervention
is less an event than a condition, less
an alien encounter than a problematic