Saif’s story epitomises the events and sentiments in the cataclysmic battle for Mosul, the apocalyptic struggle that went on for longer than Stalingrad and struck the death blow upon Islamic State’s caliphate.
Touching all who were there, the spirit of revenge subsumed the fight’s conclusion, so that there was barely time to set the laurels straight on the Iraqi army’s mighty and righteous victory over Islamic State before “goodness” became the biggest loser of the struggle, slain at the hand of a vengeful spirit that was in turn born from the rage caused by Islamic State’s own predilection for cruelty and murder.
There was no moral equivalence in the scale, intent or orchestration of what happened in the city’s tale of crime and vengeance. Islamic State was an organisation soused in the ideology of atrocity and savagery, from the self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, right down to the lowliest fighter. They acknowledged their behaviour and they advertised it, reasoning it as a necessary stage in political evolution. Their doctrine was enshrined in an infamous publication adopted by Isis as part of its ideological core: The Management of Savagery: the Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass.
First published online in 2004 under the alias Abu Bakr Naji, this work — promoting the necessity of absolute mercilessness and savagery in the creation of a pure Islamic State — was quickly adopted by al-Qaeda in Iraq, before later being incorporated into the belief system of its descendant organisation, Isis.
The Management of Savagery not only advocated pure terror and ultraviolence, but sanctified it. “Despite the blood, corpses and limbs which encompass it and the killing and fighting which its practice entails,” the author wrote, jihad is God’s “greatest mercy to man” and “slaughter is mercy”.
This core ideological tract did not merely dictate Islamic State’s behaviour but, by being central to its creed, it also made every Isis fighter culpable as a terrorist the moment they took their bay’ah, their oath of allegiance to Islamic State.
So there was a degree of inevitability to the vengeance that followed after Iraqi troops overwhelmed the final Isis positions. Even before the last of the shooting ended in Mosul’s Old City on July 17, a week after Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi had declared the battle for the city ended, the bodies of Isis suspects were floating down the Tigris, twirling slowly in the green currents, face down, their hands tied.
Other corpses appeared overnight, dumped on the desert tracks outside Mosul, shot in the head and sometimes burnt. One innovative death squad working the west bank of the river along the valley south of Mosul even took to using ambulances to move between hits, driving unhalted through checkpoints to the homes of their targets, men listed as Isis collaborators by local vigilante groups eager for retribution.
“We’ll never be able to stop the hunger of tribes for revenge here,” an Iraqi police captain told me one afternoon as we spoke about the deathly ambulances. “It’s deeper and more powerful than government or law.”
But with tribal leaders estimating that between 10 and 15 per cent of Sunni tribes had an Isis affiliation, in the absence of reconciliation this cycle of vengeance only seemed set to condemn a sizeable tranche of Iraq’s Sunni population to further isolation and embitterment: the very dynamic that allowed Isis to flourish in the first case. Its victims also included those who were guilty of nothing more than being a Sunni male, or else were just the innocent relatives of Isis members.
Elsewhere around Mosul the widows and children of Islamic State fighters were already being driven from their homes by mobs, and their land appropriated. “The seeds of Islamic State must go from our land” read the graffiti on burnt-out Isis houses. One woman I met told me her brother and four nephews had been abducted and murdered by a vigilante squad as payback for her two teenage sons having served in Isis. Both had been killed by an airstrike south of Mosul months earlier, but this did not prevent the vigilantes shooting the remaining men in her family, apart from one of her nephews, who had his eyes cut out.
The torture and abuse of Isis prisoners, already a firmly entrenched behavioural norm among Iraqi security forces, grew rampant, and in the final days of fighting and its aftermath pictures of suspected Isis members being murdered in Mosul filled social media sites. Facebook postings showed clips of men being thrown off a high rampart by the Tigris, before being shot as they lay crippled below. One clip depicted a man, his hands tied, who was filmed being stabbed repeatedly in the neck. The more moderate revenge postings showed badly beaten Isis prisoners with shoes in their mouths.
Vengeance percolated into the battlefield tactics, too. Losing patience with the many hundreds of civilians — most of them believed to be Isis families — still trapped in the final slivers of ruination held by Islamic State in the Old City, and urged on by impatient orders from Baghdad, Iraqi commanders in Mosul opted to obliterate these last streets with airstrikes and artillery, condemning fighters and civilians alike to be blasted to pieces, crushed by rubble, or entombed and suffocated in their basement shelters.
It was as well that the enemy was so hated, or else such methods of war would have been deemed unacceptable. In the meantime, Isis shot or mortared any civilians they saw trying to escape, while for their part throughout the final stage of the battle the coalition kept asserting that its own airstrike protocols were scrupulously designed to preserve civilian life. This may have been true on paper, but on the ground it looked as though Godzilla had been at work, and Iraqi heavy artillery blitzed whatever coalition airstrikes did not.
In this struggle over the battle’s narrative — which essentially tried to reconcile the facts that a mighty battle was being successfully concluded but at a frightful cost — Britain’s own Ministry of Defence decided to opt out of contextual realism altogether, asserting that during the hundreds of precision airstrikes RAF jets had conducted over Mosul there was no evidence of civilian casualties at all. The clipped banality of these ministry denials seemed incredible among the ruins, Whitehall words from suited pukes detailing the benefits of low-yield munitions while laden with the stench of megadeath.
Meantime the final victory came at a crawl. Scrambling over the banks of rubble in the Old City with troops from the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) in those last days of fighting, as the concussion from exploding hellfire missiles bounced down the ruined alleys and over us, I saw the bodies of numerous Islamic State fighters scattered among the lunar landscape, still wearing their chest webbing, stiff in their firing positions, who had died fighting to the last. Some were Iraqi. Many were foreign, and included black Africans and white Caucasians. One dead fighter was Asiatic — “Chinese! Chinese!” the soldiers yelled as machinegun fire lanced overhead — and photographs of an infant child had been taken from his webbing and laid on his blood-crusted chest.
Although the Iraqi authorities refused to disclose official casualty figures among Iraqi units fighting at this point of the Mosul battle, they were extreme. For some ISOF units, the casualty rate already stood at 50 per cent just on the east bank of the city, way before they even crossed into the heavier fighting on the west. During one large Isis ambush in the Old City in June, which involved two waves of female suicide attackers hidden among escaping civilians and went on to include Isis assault teams, snipers and mortar fire, military doctors described to me how 140 Iraqi troops were killed or wounded in the space of a few hours.
The level of physical destruction in the Old City was so all-encompassing that even some of the Iraqi generals looked embarrassed by the time it was over. They became terser as victory neared, and Haider Abadi appeared outright miserable when he visited the city in the run-up to announcing the battle complete.
“Shit — did we really do that to Mosul?” their expressions suggested as they surveyed the vista of waste.
That final day of the battle, some soldiers asked me if I wanted to see the head of a woman suicide bomber who had detonated near by. “Not really,” I replied, but they took me to see it anyway.
Her head was upright, blackened but intact; her long locks tangled and filthy. It was nothing I had not seen before. The heads of suicide bombers usually pop off like champagne corks while the torso shreds. (Once a friend found a penis wrapped in an improvised tinfoil codpiece as one of the few remnants left of a suicide bomber, a young man who, lost in the deep seas of devotion, had hoped to keep it intact for the celestial virgins in jannah, or paradise.) Someone had placed a hairbrush and can of hairspray beside the woman’s head. It was the funniest thing I saw in the whole battle: the horror of it all transmogrified into just a bad hair day. I couldn’t stop smirking whenever I thought about the joke. Maybe you had to be there to get it.
Amid this background of loathing, ultraviolence and ruination, just two days before Abadi announced battle’s end, Abdullah Aboud was captured alive in the rubble.
The story really begins in June 2014, when Islamic State first rolled into Mosul, scattering two divisions of regular Iraqi forces before them in a victory that catapulted Isis into world attention and delivered the apparatus of a quasi-state — including hundreds of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery, as well as banks, hospitals, oil refineries and two million civilians — into the terrorist group’s hands.
Saif was already a decorated member of an Iraqi Swat team at the time, a ministry of interior unit, and was a veteran of various raids and firefights across Iraq against Isis and its al-Qaeda forefathers. (One thing I always notice in conversation with Isis-killers is that while many westerners tend to bracket the Islamic State story in Iraq between their capture of Mosul and eventual defeat there, Iraqi soldiers see the fight as part of a war against the same radical group, just with different names and guises, that has been going on since 2004.)
Saif was born in the village of Juruf, a Sunni farming community on the alluvial plane on the east bank of the River Tigris, 20 miles south of Mosul. Most of those living in the area were from the Jubour tribe, the largest Arab tribe in central and northern Iraq.
In the era before Islamic State, numerous men from Saif’s family had joined the Iraqi army and police, and his father, Ahmed Khader Abdullah, was a first cousin of Major-General Najim al-Jubouri, an Iraqi commander who was to play a key role in the battle for Mosul.
The extended Jubour tribe also included Abdullah Aboud, a contemporary of Saif’s father, who lived in a village on the other side of the river. “We knew Abdullah Aboud before it all began,” Saif explains. “Relations were normal between our families. Aboud was himself a retired member of the security forces.”
Yet the decade after the US invasion of 2003 had torn at tribal allegiances across Nineveh, opening deep divisions between the communities living in the governorate, home to Iraq’s most complex weave of sectarian groups. Angered by the sectarianism of the Shia-led government in Baghdad, many men joined the growing Sunni insurgency, a disparate array of groups including al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the year before Isis swept into Mosul, Nineveh’s provincial capital, the mood around the city became brooding and intense as the Sunni-dominated insurgency worsened and sectarian violence flared up across the whole of Iraq.
In Mosul itself, the Shia-led security forces were accused of numerous extrajudicial killings, while rampant government corruption and intimidation by militias extorted huge sums of money from businesses belonging to the city’s Sunni majority.
Abdullah Aboud had joined Sunni protesters demonstrating against the government in 2013, Saif tells me, and he was sent to jail on several occasions under Article 4 of Iraq’s anti-terrorism legislation, which at the time was widely abused by the Baghdad government to silence Sunni dissent. Aboud was near to completing a short sentence in Najaf’s Tasfirat prison when the first Islamic State units arrived in Mosul on June 6, 2014, linking up with sleeper cells and attacking army checkpoints across the city.
Saif’s own experience of those few days typified the confusion suffered by Iraqi units in which a mere 1,500 Isis fighters — outnumbered 15 to 1 by Iraqi troops — took just four days to capture the whole of Mosul. His Swat unit was based in an abandoned hotel in the city. Three days after gunfire began rippling across different city districts while the voices of panic-stricken officers jabbered with increasing urgency over military radios, an Isis suicide vehicle rammed into Saif’s position, killing three of his comrades and wounding 25 others. In the coming hours many regular Iraqi army units disappeared altogether, the soldiers abandoning their uniforms and fleeing the city, leaving their vehicles and weapons behind them.
Taking their wounded with them, the Swat unit was withdrawn from the hotel to secure 250 Isis prisoners from a jail that was about to be overrun elsewhere in the city. The unit then moved on briefly to Mosul airport, before pulling back across the Tigris to the city’s eastern side on the night of June 9. The army units they expected to link up with there were nowhere in sight, and so the Swat troops handed the prisoners to a police unit in a station that was overrun by Isis hours later.
“The east side was like a ghost town,” Saif recalls. “The streets were empty. The army were gone. There were just loads of burnt-out military vehicles, which had been attacked.”
In daylight on June 10, as Islamic State announced its complete capture of Mosul, Saif’s unit completed its own retreat, crossing into the relative safety of the zone held by Kurdish peshmerga fighters east of Mosul.
As a final indignity, the Swat troops were only allowed to pass though peshmerga positions after first handing over their weapons to the Kurds. But it was not the shame of relinquishing his assault rifle that bothered Saif most.
“Many thoughts swirled through my mind that day,” he tells me, “most concerning my family. They had remained in their village. I called them but they said nothing was happening where they were. The Daesh were not yet near. I told my brother, a policeman, to get out, but he said everything was OK.”
It was a fatal mistake. Three days later, Isis arrived in Juruf.
It was a year later before Saif next saw his elder brother, his two uncles and cousins. He was in Baghdad at the time, newly appointed as one of General Jubouri’s bodyguards, who in turn had just been named as the commander of Nineveh Operations Command, the Iraqi task force being formed to recapture Mosul.
Saif received a phone call one evening in June 2015. A family source still inside Isis territory had called. The man told Saif that most of his family, who had been arrested in their village a month earlier, had been killed. Isis had filmed their deaths in a three-part video, the man said. He sent Saif the link. The soldier opened it and watched what unfolded. Then he downloaded it to watch again, “to keep me strong, to keep me focused, to keep me vengeful”, he tells me.
Nevertheless, Saif looks suddenly exhausted at the recollection of it all. “It was a night that cannot be imagined,” he says. He takes out his phone and replays the video once more, explaining to me the identities of the orange-suited men dying before us.
The video is revolting, even by the standards of Islamic State’s gallery of horrors. It opens with scenes of dead civilians being pulled from rubble by Isis fighters while a narrator condemns the US-led coalition and the local Iraqis spying on the coalition’s behalf.
Various captives in orange jumpsuits, among them Saif’s relatives, then confess to being recruited by an Iraqi officer, Lieutenant Mohammed Bassem, Saif’s cousin and a fellow Swat member, to spy on Isis and set up resistance cells in Mosul. The confessions are intercut with killing scenes.
In the first of these, three male captives are escorted to a car by Islamic State. They are put inside and an Isis fighter with a rocket-propelled grenade stands to a flank while the camera lingers on the faces on the men inside. Saif explains a missing detail as we watch.
“Three prisoners are filmed being marched to the car,” he tells me. “But four captives are filmed inside the vehicle. That is because the fourth man, my uncle, who had already lost a leg to an IED, could not walk. So they had to carry him and put him in the vehicle after the fi
rst part of the filming had been done.” The RPG is fired into the vehicle, which explodes and all the men die in a fireball. The cameras replay the explosion and fire several times from different angles. Next up, five men are marched into a cage, which is then lowered slowly into a swimming pool.
“That’s my brother,” says Saif, tapping the smartphone screen over the face of a bearded young man in the corner of the cage, Rabia Ahmed Khader, 34 years old, who is already chest-deep in water. So as to capture every last thrashing moment of their deaths, Isis installed two GoPro cameras in waterproof cases on the bars. In this way these men die.
For the finale, seven other captives, including Lieutenant Bassem’s father, are marched in line along a sandy ridge. They kneel in a row and an Isis executioner links them together with loops of detonation cord around their necks. They have their heads blown off in unison. By the time the video ends, Saif’s brother, two uncles and five cousins are all dead, killed in one or other manner. His father, terribly tortured and aware of the others’ fate, died broken in an Isis jail.
Islamic State had seized them all from Juruf in the first week in May, just days after General Jubouri’s appointment to head Nineveh Operations Command. Survivors among Saif’s family allege that Abdullah Aboud played a central role in the men’s fate. Aboud had apparently appeared back in Mosul in 2014 after his jail sentence in Najaf had ended, and quickly assumed a position of power within the caliphate, heading a local council of tribes in support of Isis and leading a recruitment drive, inciting local youth to join the terrorist group.
Shortly before their arrest, Abdullah Aboud had personally orchestrated a moment of acute shame for Saif’s male relatives, in which he had forced them to renounce their kinship with General Jubouri.
“But that wasn’t enough to save them,” Saif says. “Four days later they were arrested. Abdullah Aboud is the main one who was responsible for what happened to them after that. Many others were involved, and there were locals who gave their support to the Daesh for whatever reason. But Abdullah Aboud was the main actor.”
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 33