How a Caliphate EndsNovember/December 2019 173militias as de facto allies in Iraq but as
enemies in Syria, where U.S. proxies,
in turn, are led by Kurdish groups that
Turkey, a fellow £¬¡¢ member, consid-
ers terrorists.
Moreover, combat books can only go
so far in documenting the plight o
civilians; in Verini’s, anecdotes o
ocers jauntily disregarding danger, or
o the soldiers obscenely taunting one
another about their sisters, sometimes
blur together or narrowly avoid cheer-
leading. (I pine for a frontline book by a
female serial embedder, such as Jane
Arraf, Arwa Damon, or Kathy Gannon,
although the Iraqi military lags behind
its U.S. counterpart in letting women
reporters take equal risks as men.)
To bridge these epistemological
gaps, journalists have new tools: social
media and other digital communications.
However misused these have been,
civilians, activists, and rank-and-Äle
Äghters, in Syria especially, have turned
them into an unprecedented platform to
tell the story o their own conÁicts in
real time, making Syria arguably history’s
most documented war. I wish in hind-
sight that in the early years o the Iraq
war, then faceless insurgents and the
civilians caught between them and U.S.
Ärepower could have contacted us
directly. Yet even in recent years, online
communications have not been used as
early or as extensively in Iraq, perhaps for
as simple a reason as that dierent
teams o reporters typically cover the
two countries, and those working in
Iraq were not as used to those tools. And
in Syria, social media have sometimes
obscured important dynamics. Before
the 2013 takeover o Raqqa by and
the subsequent beheadings, foreign jihadis
heralded the arrival o the group withwhat became . Assad later imprisoned
some o those same Äghters, only to
reuse them later on. Early in the Syrian
revolt, even as he vacuumed civilian
activists and army defectors into his
torture dungeons, he released jihadis who
went on to lead hardcore militant groups,
making it easier for him to claim that the
world had to choose between him and
“the terrorists.”
Going back further, had the United
States not invaded Iraq, the country
would almost certainly not have become
a breeding ground, and later a sitting
duck, for . In fact, it’s possible to
imagine that without the invasion, the
uprisings that swept the Arab world
beginning in late 2010, or at least the
one that swept Syria, would have gone
somewhat better. Perhaps—dream for a
moment—an Iraqi revolt against
Saddam Hussein could have taken root
organically, in partnership with the
Syrian one. Instead, in the rubble left
by invasion, Iraq was riddled with Sunni
extremists, who dispatched emissaries
across the border into Syria to radicalize
the population there. A weak Iraq
permeated by Iranian power also made
it easy for Iran to recruit legions o Iraqi
Shiite militants and dispatch them
across the border into Syria to help
Assad put down the revolt.
There is more to learn on the ground
that requires the whole picture. There
has yet to be a systematic study o
whether the United States’ ordnance
has really done better than Assad’s at
sorting Äghters from civilians, especially
since the Trump administration loos-
ened the rules o engagement. There is
also a need for a closely observed
account o the United States’ messy alli-
ances. The country treats Iran-backed