Iraq takes on ISIS
A long convoy winds down the mountain, the vehicles rumbling over a dirt track. The trucks and jeeps carry Iraqi Kurdish fighters clutching assault rifles as they head into battle. Straight ahead, a towering black plume rises from the ISIS-held city of Mosul, a smoke screen designed to block the vision of coalition warplanes bombing from the air.
This is the fourth day of the Iraqi-led offensive to reclaim Mosul, a city of about 1 million people and the jewel of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. It is the most significant battle in more than two years of international fighting against ISIS, which emerged after years of Sunni militancy in Iraq and chaos in Syria to seize huge portions of both countries in 2014 and displace al-Qaeda as the world’s most pressing terror threat. The Kurdish convoy is part of a three-pronged attack aimed at seizing a layer of villages east of Mosul, one of several maneuvers meant to set the stage for the main assault on the city, weeks or even months hence.
Leading one platoon is Tania Hassan, a 26-year-old lieutenant. As he awaits the order to advance, he steps out of his armored SUV and sits cross-legged on the ground, smoking a cigarette and twisting a piece of dry grass with his fingers. Hassan’s unit comes from one of the more professional branches of the Iraqi Kurdish militias known as peshmerga, or “those who face death.” His troops are trained by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. But he has a sober view of the battle ahead. “It won’t be easy. Everywhere is a trap,” he says. “Everywhere there are IEDs,” or improvised explosive devices, the bombs that killed
