How a Caliphate EndsNovember/December 2019 175best Iraqi units summarily execute
prisoners. One o Verini’s most likable
characters, a chubby-cheeked major
named Hassan, casually admits to one
such killing and then shows Verini the
body. The episode comes near the end
o the book and gets short shrift. I
wanted more on how Verini assimilated
the execution into his understanding o
his frontline companions and on how
common such killings were.AFTER ISIS
They Will Have to Die Now documents
the practical application o a popular
theory informing much o U.S. policy:
that having locals Äght wars engenders
less resentment. But this doesn’t always
hold true. Just like U.S. forces, Iraqis
have struggled with the diculty o
saving a city without destroying it, and
they have met with similar results. As
Verini writes, “The more Moslawis
were killed, the more they resented the
soldiers, and the more soldiers were
killed, the more they resented the
Moslawis.” In some ways, the Iraqis’
challenge is worse than the Americans’,
since they need to somehow live to-
gether, to envision shared citizenship
with mortal enemies.
Mosul was recaptured in the summer
o 2017, and the city is now in the
throes o a slow rebuilding. Today,
has been defeated militarily as a territo-
rial entity and discredited by its misrule
among those who gave it a chance as a
government. But the political problems
that allowed it to gain a foothold haven’t
begun to be solved. And although its
true believers have been dealt a set-
back, they are still available as recruits
for decentralized attacks in Iraq, Syria,
and worldwide.bomb—recalling, in my mind, a line
from the World War II poet Randall
Jarrell: “When I died they washed me
out o the turret with a hose.”
Verini travels mostly with the
Counter Terrorism Service, a group o
special operations forces that reports to
Iraq’s prime minister and that U.S.
ocials viewed as the most competent
and least politicized Iraqi unit. Yet at
every turn, he Änds the unevenness o
twenty-Ärst-century warfare—the same
type o disconnect and confusion that
leads sophisticated drones to hit wed-
ding parties in Afghanistan and Yemen.
The Iraqis working on the ground
beneath high-tech U.S. jets carry
homemade mortar tubes, forget to take
the wrapping o grenade launchers,
wear misspelled shoulder patches, and
shun body armor. Verini watches them
work with Western special forces
ocers to call in airstrikes from an
alarmingly exposed command post,
communicating on WhatsApp. Opera-
tional security concerns aside, Verini
wonders about uncounted civilian
casualties. Watching impact clouds
bloom across Mosul, he observes that in
the Pentagon’s claim o scrupulous
precision, “you had to smell horseshit.”
Verini doesn’t dig deeply into this
but cites others’ reports: one airstrike
said to target an position during
the battle for Mosul killed as many as
150 civilians, according to Amnesty
International and local witnesses quoted
in several news outlets; a New York
Times investigation published in 2017
found that one in Äve airstrikes by the
anti- coalition resulted in unin-
tended civilian deaths, 31 times the rate
the Pentagon claimed. The book also
adds to growing evidence that even the