Iraq News Now

In February 2017, the New Yorker published a captivating article on the anti-ISIS war raging in Iraq that read like a fever-dream mashup of of Die Hard and Apocalypse Now. War correspondent Luke Mogelson profiled an elite Iraqi SWAT unit of Mosul policemen seeking vengeance over depraved ISIS terrorists that had kidnapped many of their families, sharing gut-wrenching eyewitness accounts of combat, torture and physical and psychological trauma.

That Mogelson’s story featured beats and larger-than-life characters that would have fit naturally into an action movie apparently did not go unnoticed. Three years later the Netflix film Mosul, directed and written by Michael Matthew Carnahan (writer of The Kingdom, World War Z, 21 Bridges) uses the familiar structure of action thrillers like Sicario and Extraction as a vehicle to depict the Nineveh SWAT team’s actions in the nine-month urban battle that broke the back of ISIS.

Vitally, Mosul stars Arab actors speaking Arabic, reflecting the fact that the costly business of evicting ISIS one street block at a time from a city of a million people was undertaken almost entirely by Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces.

For over three decades, Iraqis have largely served as opaque enemies or victims in American cinema—in Mosul Iraqis deservedly serve as the protagonists of their own story.

The first part of this article is a review of Mosul. The second part delves into the film’s accuracy (with moderate spoilers), and explains the real-life background behind the Nineveh SWAT team and other elements portrayed in the film.

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In the opening scenes of Mosul, rookie Iraq-Kurdish policeman Kawa (played by Tunisian actor Adam Bessa) is recruited on a  corpse-strewn battlefield by the grizzled and ruthless Major Jasem (Iraqi-American Suhail Dabbach), leader of the Nineveh SWAT team. The film follows the team on a hellish journey across tMosul, encountering sudden death and tragedy at every intersection as the Major pursues a mysterious mission with apparently little official support.

The U.S. is only mentioned a few times, one soldier commenting that over-use of air strikes was reducing their beloved home city to ruins. Mosul indeed captures the devastated city blocks and uneasily allied factions of the eponymous city at its nadir, evoking the post-nuclear urban wastelands of the Fallout series of videogames. Of course no nuclear bomb transformed Iraq’s second metropolis into an urban death trap—just countless air strikes, artillery and mortar shells, IEDs and kamikaze trucks

The devastation results a disconcerting three-dimensional battlefield where frontlines are forever uncertain. Snipers can materialize with little notice, firing through slits in concrete atop high-rise apartment buildings; enemies may lurk in a basement adjoining a narrow, rubble-choked alleyway.

Even up close, the allegiances of fellow Iraqis are always suspect. The SWAT teams relies on a dubious list of names compiled by intelligence when determining whether an individual is due for execution or first aid.

In between fast-paced action scenes, vignettes highlight various aspects of the Battle of Mosul: the use of vehicle-borne IEDs and kamikaze drones, ISIS’s policy of killing civilians (ie., human shields) attempting to flee combat zones, and the tension between Iranian-backed Shia militias and the predominantly Sunni natives of Mosul. The film’s heartbreaking conclusion spells out in concrete terms the reasons motivating the SWAT team’s long fight.

Carnahan honestly depicts the SWAT team’s willingness to torture and kill prisoners, as was witnessed by Mogelson and journalists covering other Iraqi units. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t go so far as to critique human rights abuses by anti-ISIS forces—say for their propensity to sometimes affect the wrong guy—despite the role torture and vigilante killings have had in perpetuating cycles of violence in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.

I also worried that by shoehorning Nineveh SWAT’s story into the format of an action picture, the film imposes a degree of narrative tidiness on the chaos and absurdity of war, one in which the great sacrifices made by protagonists must eventually pay off with a worthy outcome. In reality, the the consequences of individual actions amidst a large-scale conflict are often far less clean-cut.

Mosul nonetheless rightly celebrates the Iraqis that took the fight to ISIS on the ground and liberated a ruined metropolis from an unspeakably vile terrorist army’s grasp—and does so without prettifying the ugly reality of that struggle.

Most importantly, it doesn’t lose sight of the highly personal stakes that motivated Iraqis to acts not only of great brutality but also of great compassion and courage.

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In this part of the article, we’ll look at the film’s accuracy in portraying the Nineveh SWAT team and various aspects of the Battle of Mosul based on the article by Luke Mogelson (which you should definitely read!) Some film spoilers follow.

What’s the back story of the Nineveh SWAT team?

Nineveh is the name of the northwestern Iraqi province which includes Mosul. The Nineveh SWAT unit was formed and trained by the U.S. military in the late 2000s and battled various terrorist and criminal elements in province for years before ISIS proper even existed.

When in June 2014 a small ISIS force drove down from bases in Syria into Mosul, a garrison of 30,000 Iraqi troops panicked and fled. However, a few dozen policemen of the Nineveh SWAT team held out at the Mosul Hotel for four days. ISIS eventually compelled them to retreat after a ramming a tanker-truck full of explosives into the hotel, killing three and wounding most of the rest.

Because of the casualties the SWAT team had inflicted, ISIS eschewed its customary offer to allow captives a chance to switch sides, and summarily executed 26 of the team’s members.

The Nineveh SWAT policemen who escaped regrouped and began supporting Iraqi government operations under the leadership of two senior officers, the formal and thoughtful Col. Rayyan Abdelrazzak and the “erratic and flamboyant” Major Mezher Sadoon. These two individuals and their contrasting temperaments were amalgamated into the fictional film character of Major Jasem.

The journalist recalls of an irate Sadoon “…more than once I’d seen him shoot his Kalashnikov a few inches to the right or left of some terrified offender [in his unit].”

Did the team go on a rogue mission as shown in the film?

The unit’s rogue mission in the film is fictitious. However, Mogelson does make clear the unit was itching to get engaged in the action in the areas around Mosul, where many of their families lived. At one point Major Sadoon is quoted as saying “We’re not doing any more operations down here. From now on, all our missions will be toward our families.”

At least one individual in the team is described as going AWOL to aid his family behind enemy lines. And on several occasions in Mogelson’s article, the unit’s members do attempt to help their families escape ISIS captivity when deployed just a few street blocks away.

How heavy were the Nineveh SWAT team’s losses?

Prior to the credits, Mosul lists twelve members KIA from 2016-2018, not counting the 26 murdered by ISIS during the capture of Mosul in 2014. However, the SWAT did not lose as many soldiers killed in one day as is depicted in the film.

That’s in part because it was typical to suffer a much higher ratio of wounded to killed. For example, in a disastrous battle at Intisar on November 7, 2016, the SWAT team suffered losses of 22 wounded and 2 killed out of 40 personnel, as well as four out of its seven Humvees destroyed, with two more damaged.

You can see just how desperate and dangerous the warzone in Mosul is in the video below.

How capable was a police SWAT unit on the battlefield?

The Nineveh SWAT team was an elite unit originally trained to apprehend dangerous terrorists. Many of its members had years of combat experience and had survived multiple deadly assassination attempts, as well as had family members killed or injured in reprisals.

Mogelson’s account of the unit’s actions shows it was highly motivated and willing to take on missions that more heavily armed regular army units balked at. But he was also frank in describing the limitations of placing a civilian police unit into a war zone:

“The unit was small and lacked logistical support: there was no one to bring them food, water, ammunition, or extra weapons, let alone reinforcements. They didn’t have their own medics, intelligence officers, mechanics, engineers, or bomb technicians. They had no mortar or artillery teams (or any contact with units that did have them). No one on the SWAT team was authorized to request air support. None of the American advisers embedded with the various military divisions seemed to know that the unit existed. It had no ambulance, which meant that it had to sacrifice a fighting vehicle to transport casualties. The SWAT team’s Humvees were useless against suicide attacks. The men had no helmets, and most of them wore flak jackets that lacked bulletproof plates.”

The lack of proper medical support, for example, led one soldier to lose an injured hand because he could not initially pay a surgery bill out of pocket.

A much larger U.S.-trained Iraqi special forces unit known as the Golden Division instead spearheaded most offensive operations against ISIS. Mechanized units of the Iraqi regular army provided fire support and held newly liberated territory, while Kurdish peshmerga militia secured vital roads and towns to the west of Mosul.

What is a PMU and why were Mosul police so tense interacting with one?

PMU stands for Popular Mobilization Unit—part of an extensive Shia paramilitary militia force (also known as the Popular Mobilization Force or PMF) formed in 2014 after ISIS captured Mosul and seemed poised to threaten even Baghdad.  

The Shia branch of Islam is followed by the majority of Iraqis. However, a majority of natives of Mosul adhere to the opposing Sunni branch of the faith.

The PMUs, which were heavily advised and armed by Iran (a predominantly Shia nation), gave the Iraqi government manpower at a desperate hour. But they were infamous for committing atrocities when occupying Sunni-majority communities, so Sunni natives of Nineveh province did not want them to participate in the liberation of Mosul (they did end up doing so anyway.) The PMUs were also unpopular with some Iraqis as they were seen as proxies of Iran’s extensive influence over Iraq.

In the film, the Iraqi leader of the SWAT unit gets in a shouting match with the Iranian officer leading a PMU, who expresses scorn for Iraq’s history as an oft-contentious grouping of Shia and Sunni Arabs, and Kurds.

Incompatible ammunition

Iraq’s armed forces primarily use a mix of weapons of Soviet/Russian manufacture as well as arms furnished by the U.S. after the invasion in 2003. This meant that Iraqi units sometimes had logistical difficulties due to using incompatible ammunition.

Mogelson wrote that the Ninveh SWAT team was equipped with Russian 7.62-millimeter caliber Kalashnikovs and PKM light machine guns, as well as ‘Dushka’ (DShK) 12.7-millimeter heavy machine guns, which uses a longer a cartridge than the similar U.S.-built .50-caliber machinegun. This constrained the policemen from sharing ammunition with the U.S.-equipped Golden Division while deployed together.

Of course, the SWAT members did use U.S. Humvees, some of which mounted American Mk.19 automatic grenade launchers in addition to the DShKs.

As the film depicts, even Iranian-backed PMUs were known to acquire U.S. small arms and equipment including Humvees and no less than nine M1 Abrams main battle tanks—much to the irritation of the Pentagon.

Kamikaze drones and suicide trucks

Mosul showcases two technologies used extensively by ISIS in the battle of Mosul. The most important was the Vehicle-Based Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED). The classical  form of this weapon is an innocuously parked vehicles used as a remotely detonated land mines, as depicted in the movie.

But heavily-armored suicide VBIEDs (SVBIEDs) mass-produced in ISIS factories for use by a suicide-drivers were also used extensively to barrel towards Iraqi military convoys and defensive positions before detonating in their midst. One such truck can be seen in the captured ISIS base at the end of Mosul.

VBIEDs were one of ISIS’s primary heavy weapon systems, and at one point a sustained VBIED attack even was instrumental in capturing the city of Ramadi in 2015. In Mosul, a common ISIS tactic was to deploy kamikaze trucks waiting in a side alley at a backswept angle to a major road. The allowed such trucks to swoop down on advancing Iraqi government columns with little warning.

Mosul also shows how ISIS made effective use of drones in combat, converting many commercial drones to drop small grenades or for use as kamikaze weapons. Such drone attacks were terrifying and difficult to repel with small arms fire.

However, probably more lethal overall was ISIS use of drones to spot targets for bombardment by mortar teams.

What is the film’s ending realistic?

ISIS was infamous for its large-scale organized practice of sexual assault, which included capturing, transporting and selling women for sexual slavery, and arranging forced “marriages” of women as rewards for ISIS fighters. Women from ethnic and religious minorities, as well as spouses attached to Iraqi army and police personnel, were frequently targeted by ISIS.

Mogelson’s article describes the personal stakes for the Nineveh SWAT unit:

…a Humvee raced up the dirt road that led from the trench and skidded to a stop in front of us. A young policeman, sobbing violently, tumbled out and collapsed into Basam’s arms...

Basam brought the man, Ahmed Saad, to a bench, where Major Mezher and others were smoking a hookah. Ahmed told Mezher that ISIS fighters had shown up at his in-laws’ house, in Mosul, and taken away his wife, his son, and his daughter. Ahmed’s mother had called his brother, Saef, who was also on the SWAT team, and Saef had relayed the news to Ahmed…

Ahmed had stopped crying. The men had offered him the hookah, and he stared at the ground, smoking.

“Do you know who it was?” Mezher asked.

“Probably the barber,” Ahmed said. “He called me not long ago and said, ‘If you think you’re a state, why don’t you come to Mosul?’ ”

“We’re coming.”

For a while, no one spoke. Then Hadi said, “They took my wife to the court and divorced her from me.”

All in all, though Mosul bends and condenses some details to fit into its action-thriller narrative, it’s essentially accurate in depicting many grim realities of the Battle of Mosul.