Small Wars Journal

Why Iraq Asked Thousands of Civilians Not to Flee a City’s Destruction

Wed, 07/19/2017 - 12:21pm

Why Iraq Asked Thousands of Civilians Not to Flee a City’s Destruction by James Verini - New York Times

In a film, on the news, you watch a war. While in a war, you mostly hear it. Weapons are fired day and night, but only sometimes do you see them fired. As much as images, then, each battle takes on its own sounds.

The battle of Mosul began officially on Oct. 17, 2016. Sonically, it didn’t come into its own until some weeks later. In the opening skirmishes, as Iraqi troops encountered Islamic State fighters on farmland and in villages outside the city, rounds whistled unobstructed through the air and thudded in the sod, a vague overture. When the troops breached the easternmost districts of the city proper — in early November — then you could begin to really listen to the conflict...

So ISIS, in its efforts to hold Mosul — or, really, to kill as many people and destroy as much of the city as it could while losing it, as the jihadists knew they inevitably must — relied on tactics known in Western military parlance as “harassing fire.” It was a phrase that amused Iraqi soldiers whose English was sufficient to understand its insufficiency and who had to actually endure this harassment. ISIS’s harassers included world-class snipers, crack mortar teams, the suicidal drivers of vehicle-­borne improvised explosive devices, or V.B.I.E.D.s — mobile car bombs — and, to direct these efforts, something new to warfare, a fleet of commercial-­market drones. ISIS managed to smuggle untold numbers of the small, cheap machines, the kind of thing you can buy on Amazon, into Mosul…

… The Iraqi special forces had been fighting ISIS for more than two years. They had fought them near Baghdad, in Ramadi, then Falluja, Tikrit and Baiji, pushing the jihadists north nearly 250 miles to Mosul, the caliphate’s greatest urban stronghold. Many of Karim’s comrades had fought Al Qaeda and ISIS’s other precursors before that. The tip of the spear into Mosul, the special forces had been going without a break for weeks now, taking heavy casualties. Karim had been wounded five times since Ramadi. In Falluja, a rocket skivered a Humvee in which he was the gunner. It was the scar from that attack that he wanted to show me, a discolored sunken patch below his rib cage. Looking down at it, he said, “It was a big hole before.” …

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