They Will Have To Die Now; Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate
Paolo Pellegrin (Jacket photograph) New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [10], 277, [1] pages. Maps, A Note on Methods, Translation, Style, and Sources. Signed by the author on the title page. Minor wear and staining to lower corner of rear of DJ and rear cover. James Verini is an American magazine journalist and book author. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. He also writes for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atavist, Foreign Policy, and others. His book They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate was well received. In 2015, he received a National Magazine Award for feature writing for "Love and Ruin," an article in The Atavist about the history of American intervention in Afghanistan. He won a 2015 George Polk Award for "Should the United Nations Wage War to Keep Peace?", about the civil war in Democratic Republic of Congo, in National Geographic. "They Will Have to Die Now is the story of what happened after most Americans stopped paying attention to Iraq...It will take its place among the very best war writing of the past two decades." --George Packer, author of Our Man and The Assassins Gate.
James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis' last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year, nor that it would become, in the words of the Pentagon, "the most significant urban combat since WWII." They Will Have to Die Now takes the reader into the heart of the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. We see unspeakable violence, improbable humanity, and occasional humor. We meet an Iraqi major fighting his way through the city with a bad leg; a general who taunts snipers; an American sergeant who removes his glass eye to unnerve his troops; a pair of Moslawi brothers who welcomed the Islamic State, believing, as so many Moslawis did, that it might improve their shattered lives. Verini also relates the rich history of Iraq, and of Mosul, one of the most beguiling cities in the Middle East. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: 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 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 [of the battle] 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. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Mosul, Nineveh, Iraq, Islamic State, Insurgency, Special Forces, Petraeus, Caliphate, ISIS, Peshmerga, Militias, Urban Combat, Urban Warfare, Jihadi, Moslawi, War Correspondent
ISBN: 9780393652475
[Book #87035]
Price: $115.00