Review by Booklist Review
Journalist Verini offers up a searing account of the battle against the Islamic State in Mosul in 2016 and 2017, focusing not just on the clashes with the jihadi fighters but also on the plight of the people caught in the middle of the battling forces. His primary subjects are two middle-aged brothers, Abu Omar and Abu Fahad, who resided in Mosul before the conflict drove them from their homes and into a refugee camp. What Verini learns is that the instability of the region and the corruption of the Iraqi government led many people, including the brothers, to embrace the Islamic State when they initially seized the city in 2014, an act they come to regret long before Iraqi government and American troops retake the city. Verini presents with sensitivity the bloody and complicated history of the area, the fraught feelings Iraqis have towards America and its involvement in their country, and the way conflict with the Islamic State has ripped families apart. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand this ongoing and tragic conflict.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Verini debuts with a vivid chronicle of the 2016 battle to recapture Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, from the Islamic State. Noting that "in wartime, truth is inseparable from rumor, and in Iraq, history is always cut with conspiracy," Verini sketches the millennia of global conflicts that have shaped Mosul, from its founding as the Assyrian capital of Nineveh to its conquests by, among others, Alexander the Great, Sulamein the Magnificent, and U.S. Army general David Petraeus. For Mosul's citizens, Verini says, international fears of a terrorist caliphate obscured a raft of more quotidian concerns, including the Islamic State's "galling" ban on smoking. Reporting from the front lines, Verini documents how an unlikely coalition of Iranian-aligned militias, American special forces, Iraqi army units, and Kurdish Peshmerga collaborated to free the city after two and a half years of ISIS dominion. Shia militiamen, Verini writes, "looked as though they'd been kitted out at some urban unisex martial athleisure boutique," while his fellow foreign correspondents' "shallowly shocking coverage existed somewhere on the same spectrum as the Caliphate's own blood-porn." Readers interested in war journalism and Iraq's future prospects will be drawn to Verini's sardonic humor and sharp eye for detail. (Oct.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Verini, who covered the conflict in Mosul for National Geographic from 2016 to 2017, vividly describes the campaign to expel the Islamic State (IS) from the Iraqi city. The victory of Iraq's Counter Terrorism Service over the IS ended after three years of indiscriminate killings and destruction of Mosul, costing the lives of 1,200 Iraqi soldiers and thousands of civilians. The author recounts Mosul's strategic and economic importance from its emergence as the capitol of the Assyrian empire in the 14th century BC to its recent wars against Iran and the United States. Verini excels at describing the fate of citizens and soldiers who faced death from snipers and vehicle-borne, improvised explosive devices, while gaining respect for the Iraqis who protected and befriended him. He also provides a thoughtful analysis of the Jihadi mind-set that encourages death as martyrdom. Although life remains harsh in the post-IS era, Verini concludes that Mosul will persevere as it has for ages. VERDICT This brisk narrative will grip readers of battle accounts and will give those fascinated by Middle East politics much to ponder. See Linsey Hilsum's In Extremis for another work about the dangers encountered by civilians and journalists during war.--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Moving reportage by an American journalist who embedded with the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service and with Kurdish peshmerga forces fighting the Islamic State group.Coming from Brooklyn, George Polk Award-winning journalist Verinia National Geographic contributing writer and frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazinewas determined to serve a kind of "penance" when he arrived in Baghdad in the summer of 2016 for the first time; he was ashamed that he had been "too scared" to go to Afghanistan fresh out of college after 9/11. This time, he traveled in the wake of the Iraqi army as it moved on IS, which had captured Mosul two years before and declared a triumphant caliphate led by insurgent Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Throughout the taut narrative, Verini brings us vivid and often heartbreaking stories of everyday Iraqis, occupied and humiliated for eons, enduring yet another war "that nevertheless would not be happening, at least not in this way, if not for the American war that preceded it." The invasion of Mosul was conducted by the Counter-Terrorism Service, which "had put the first real puncture in the [IS] defenses" in 2016, as well as multiple divisions of the Iraqi army, the Iraqi federal police, and international forces. The official end of combat, in Mosul, occurred in July 2017. Verini's account is startlingly candid and informed, and the author has clearly benefited from some years of distance. He manages to effectively convey the complicated mess on all sides: American, Iraqi, IS. After the months of fighting, Mosul "looked as though a vindictive god had wiped his hand across the city." In the battle, writes the author, "twelve hundred Iraqi soldiers were killed," and while "no one will ever know how many civilians died, it was certainly in the thousands."A deeply thoughtful boots-on-the-ground work about a topic that many of us have stopped thinking about. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
