The Daily - The Daily Presents “Caliphate,” Chapter 7

Episode Date: June 2, 2018

The New York Times has introduced a documentary audio series that follows Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism for The Times, on her quest to understand ISIS. Today, as a special episode of “The Daily,” we offer Chapter 7 of “Caliphate,” in which Rukmini examines what ISIS left behind as their hold on Mosul crumbled. For more information about the series, visit nytimes.com/caliphate.This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.

From the New York Times and the team that brought you The Daily, this is Caliphate. Just test one, two. Okay, that's loud. Hawk, can you sing me something? Careless whisperer. What is it? I forgot the words. It's for George Michael. I like him.

I like George Michael. Yeah. When in Iraq did you first hear George Michael? It was in 1998, I believe. I was at home, there was this TV, on TV, local TV. There was some videos like western songs, like music videos. Music videos, yeah. And there I have it. I was moved by the lyrics and how it was soft. It touched my heart actually. I know you're not a fool

Yeah, but no, my love, Metallica. Well, then I guess a better question is how does somebody growing up in Mosul fall in love with Metallica? Yeah, friends of mine, they were like senior in college. They were like, there's some guy, some dude called Metallica. You should listen to him. So I was like, where to buy any of his records? There isn't any here in Mosul. It was an embargo, if you remember at that time. And everything foreigner or English or American is like something forbidden. They were like keep it in the hush-hush but you go to that record shop it was like one record shop. Yeah. The entire Mosul. And we were so

lucky to have him. I was like hanging in there and looking at all kinds of you know like pictures of Western music and everything. And I was so new to this so I told them, excuse me, do you have Metallica? He says, yes, of course. Which year do you want? And I was like, oh my God, which year? I didn't know what to ask.

I told him, just give me some of his best hits. For the first time I played the tape, I was like, what the fuck is this? Just all noise and chaos. He keeps crying and, you know, like shouting. But after like two or three times I listened to it. Actually, most of his songs are really sincere. It's about armies and wars and why are we dying in vain and everything.

Since I was born, I've seen nothing in this country but wars. And more wars and more wars. So I made some kind of connection that stood deep with me. And from that minute on, I was like, that's what I'm looking for. The battle has begun to recapture Mosul. This has been an occupation essentially by ISIS for more than two years. It was the largest city in Iraq captured by ISIL fighters. Now it's the only one they have left. This is the beginning of what could be a long battle.

Nearly nine months of gruelling urban warfare has left Mosul in ruins. ISIS's hold on the city is down to less than half a square mile. And so now it's heavy urban guerrilla warfare. A few thousand ISIS fighters pitted against tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and the full force of the U.S US coalition. Chapter 7, Mosul. Good morning. Good morning. So, is this even worth asking how you slept?

Oh God, this is where we get to see each other's PJs. Yep, these are my PJs. This is mine. Pretty basic questions this morning. Actually, could you start off by telling us what day is it? It's Saturday, July 8th. 2017. 2017.

And where are we? We're in Iraq, finally. And basically Iraqi forces are poised to take back Mosul. We're hearing that they're going to take back the city in 24 to 78 hours. That timeline seems to be somewhat stretchy. It keeps on changing. But no matter what, I think it's somewhat imminent. And after three years of ISIS holding the second largest city in all of Iraq, Iraqi forces with coalition backing are poised to take it back. Oh, God. Here we go.

RC just came off of the phone with ABM, and we're going to aim to leave around 11 a.m. So aim to be ready, you and Andy, for 11 a.m. I mean, we need to be suited up in our bags packed for, what, an overnight? Just in case? Yeah, just in case. Okay. And you want me to meet you down at the lobby?

Yeah. Okay. All right, if anything changes, just give me a call in my room. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right.

If anything changes, just give me a call in my room. Yes. Sounds good. Let's start with the drive. Yeah. So we hop in the car. You have maps to tell me? We're in northern Iraq in the safe zone where we're staying in a hotel. How long is our drive?

Two hours. And we are trying to get to Western Mosul to basically the last holdout that ISIS had. I had a tip about a building that was in that area that I knew had been the headquarters of the Hizb ut-Din. It was the Hizb ut-Din under ISIS. And I just knew that if we could get there, I mean, I thought that if we could get there right when it was liberated, we would find the motherlode of documents. What's this? That's a checkpoint.

In the car, we have our amazing driver, Ala. How are you? Good. Good. They know me? She's an old customer. She's an old customer. driver, Alaa. We also have two security advisors. One of them is Rocky, and then we've got our international security advisor. You want me to talk about putting on the hijab? And then there's Hawk. How do you want to be identified? Hawk?

Of course, yeah. And then there's Hawk. Yeah. How do you want to be identified? Hawk? Of course, yeah. I actually ended up spending quite a bit of time with Hawk, sitting with him in the back seat. What did your parents do? I learned a lot about him. My mother is a teacher. My father used to be in the army.

I learned that he loves both George Michael and Metallica. I started writing poetry. I don't know, it just came to me, an inspiration or something. But you've known him a lot longer than I have. How is it that you would describe Hawk? Oh, Hawk. Hawk is my translator and fixer.

The first sign that I did is like this. And he's also my friend. He's just like, what? He's really funny. To drain your eyes? Oh my God. Like half the time I'm with Hawk, we're laughing. Fucking hell.

He's a fabulous translator. What's the phrase in Arabic, Hawk? He's very methodical in terms of providing me accurate information, providing me good translation. He's a native Muzuli. He's born and bred in Muzul. And what a lot of people don't get about Muzul is that this is, in a way, one of the most ancient cities in the world.

is that this is, in a way, one of the most ancient cities in the world. We used to have all types of cultures and religions in our province. The area in which Mosul is located is mentioned in the Old Testament. Its history dates back thousands of years. And they were the ones who started writing, the very first ones. It was near Mosul that one of the tablets on which the Epic of Gilgamesh was written was found. This is considered the earliest work of literature. Supposedly our grand-grandfathers, they mobilized the very first wheel in history.

It's also a modern city. It was the economic hub of the region. There was a major university. And if you were to walk through its warren of lanes, you could easily stumble upon villas that could have been airlifted out of Santa Barbara. Manucured lawns, orange trees, lemon trees, and running through the heart of the city is the Tigris River. Yeah, and the best place where I want to clear my mind, and if I'm like upset or something, I would go directly to the riverbanks.

Maybe sometimes I go for a dip and then go out. And just by looking at the river, you see how magnificent the feelings will be. They will take all the stress out of you, out of no time. But Mosul, like the rest of Iraq, paid a heavy price under the increasingly tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein. He dragged the country into conflict after conflict, the eight-year Iran war, the incursion into Kuwait. And this, in turn, led to sanctions that impoverished the Iraqi people and...

My fellow citizens. Then, in 2003... At this hour... The U.S. invaded Iraq. American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. Yeah, actually, in 2003, it wasn't the final examinations yet in college, and the Americans came in to cover Iraq.

At that point in time, Haqq was just getting ready to graduate from university, and he remembers welcoming U.S. forces and being hopeful that... We're going to rebuild, we're going to do this and that. It would be the start of an even further modernization of Mosul and of Iraq overall. I was, like, looking at Japan, Germany,

and I was, like like thinking to myself, they're going to build some bases here and we're going to flourish. I mean, as a country. But actually what happened? A suicide bombing has just taken place. Car bombs, suicide attacks, targeted assassinations. Five more Americans were killed in action today.

And it keeps getting worse and worse. And pretty soon it had devolved into a chaotic ground war. At least 18 people were killed in Iraq after a car bomb exploded at a crowded Shiite funeral. That chaos was the perfect soil for a growing insurgency. The insurgents were at first fighting the American invaders, the crusaders as they called them. But very soon, they also turned on fellow Muslims. They began targeting the Shia sect, saying that they were not true believers, that they had rejected the true faith. This is like Al-Wala Wal-Burah.

Exactly. Al-Wala Wal-Burah. Because keep in mind, the leader of the insurgency was a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was the founder of the group that goes on to become ISIS. And according to files that were just recently declassified by the CIA, he was in Mosul as early as 2003. And there he began laying the groundwork, recruiting followers, recruiting fighters, and building cells inside the city. recruiting fighters, and building cells inside the city. So year after year, as the chaos engulfs the nation, this little group that begins with just a few dozen fighters grows.

They're gaining ground. They're gaining acolytes and followers. Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. And when the U.S. finally pulls out and the last soldiers leave Iraq in the final weeks of 2011? After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over. They pulled off leaving Iraq much more devastated than before. They hand over Mosul to the Iraqi military and to corrupt officials and to these underground cells that were in some ways lying in wait all along. They shouldn't have.

Anyhow, then comes ISIS. No time. And by the summer of 2014, ISIS had reached the outskirts of Mosul with what people say was just a few hundred fighters. They sent word to their supporters inside. So can you tell me just personally? Yes. What were you doing basically the day that ISIS... And then they ambushed the city.

There were massive gunshots everywhere. We can hear it even in my neighborhood. And then they ambushed the city. Hawk gets a worried phone call from a friend of his, and the friend is saying, do you think the city is going to fall? I told him, OK, it's going to be OK. No, no problem. He says, no, no, we don't understand. And Haq advises his friend that, no, this is nothing. Security forces were everywhere. Streets were like crawling with security forces, with their equipment, everything. There are thousands of Iraqi troops in and around the city.

They have Humvees. They have sophisticated rifles. They've been fully equipped by American forces. So we were saying, it's a bunch of terrorists and they will be eliminated soon. But he, like many of the people in Mosul, and probably like most of Iraq, had no sense, absolutely no sense, that the city could fall. I was like, it's going to be solved the next morning. To my surprise, I took a sleep and I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning. My father said, don't go out.

I was like, what are you talking about? He said, all the security forces have moved out, but I told my father, I want to see what's going on. So I walked out on my rooftop. I saw by my own eyes, Humvees were burning. The compounds, army compounds were burning. It's all been on fire. Fire were everywhere.

Another major piece of what America fought for in Iraq was lost today. The fight proving too much for the U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers. In Mosul today, we saw sporadic gunfire and burning military vehicles. The insurgents seized police stations, banks and government buildings. Some reportedly discarding their uniforms, abandoning their military armed vehicles and weapons. It could take weeks or longer for Iraqi troops to recapture the city of Mosul. So in this timeline, ISIS takes over Mosul in June. They declare their caliphate from there in July.

And then what? First, there was this kind of Wafiqa in Medina. Very soon, within, I would say, the first week of their arrival. Wafiqa is like pact or city terms, if we can say. They began positioning people in traffic circles, and they were handing out a pamphlet or a flyer to people through the windows of their cars. It was first on loudspeakers, and then it was on flyers. They were using flyers. The pamphlet was something called the Charger of the City.

So this is what we were abided by. And it laid out, in a constitution-like form, both the new rules under which the population would now be governed and... And they were saying that we are coming here in peace, we want you all to be equal, all the security forces are to handle their weapons and to say their repentance. Their promise to the people. Their promise was, you have lived under these infidel regimes. You have seen what a disaster it's been. Now you're going to see a huge difference with the Islamic State. Corruption is not going to be allowed.

They are now going to live in a virtuous society and that they are going to see the fruits of that virtue as a result of their citizenship in this caliphate. So can you just explain to him what I'm doing? So before you and I came to Mosul, Haq and I had traveled to a bunch of different towns, not just Mosul, but to the town of Tel Kif, north of the city, to the Nineveh Plains,

to the town of Nimrod. And in all of these locations, we spent a lot of our time speaking to people who had spent years living under ISIS. And time and again, the thing that Haq and I kept hearing is that ISIS was actually addressing some of the longstanding grievances they had had with the previous Iraqi government. So you said, I used to work in this sidewalk stand by chicken, fresh chicken.

So for example, In a sidewalk stand selling chicken, yeah. One day Hawk and I were in a town north of Mosul where we met a guy who sold chickens on the side of the street. He told us about how one day a customer came to him, he picked out a chicken, asked him to slaughter it, he did. When he handed over the chicken, the customer opened his wallet

and said, I'm so sorry, I only have half the money. The merchant accepted the money on the understanding that this guy would pay him back. And then week after week, the guy refused to pay him back. And then week after week, the guy refused to pay him back. So the amount of money that this guy was stiffed was literally a couple of dollars. And he explained to me that under the Iraqi government, he wouldn't have bothered to put in a police report because the bribe he would have had to pay would have been probably more than the amount of money he was trying to recuperate.

But under ISIS, he said that he went to their police station. The ISIS policeman took down the complaint. He didn't take a bribe. He sent out one of his officers to investigate. They found the guy who hadn't paid. And within a couple of days, they got the guy to pay up. We went to a couple of small towns where people, for as long as they remember, they'd never been able to have more than four or five, maybe six hours of electricity a day. And they said that ISIS came in and they sent a committee of electrical engineers to go study the problem and they fixed it.

Now, you couldn't turn on all of your appliances at the same time. You couldn't use air conditioners or big things like that. But people now said that 24-7, around the clock, they could at least turn on the lights. How was garbage collection during the time when ISIS was there? And one of the near universal things that people told Hawke and I, can she compare before ISIS and then when ISIS came, what the garbage collection, how it changed? Is that the streets were cleaner. But after, good.

And this is the thing where to this day, I don't think people understand this. It was a functioning society. It was a functioning state. It was not recognized by anybody. But in some ways, they usurped and did better than the government

that they replaced. And that's pretty... That's crazy. Crazy. Yeah. Except if you're in ISIS, this is a group that has always known how to mine local grievances and use them to their advantage. They're trying to grow this global caliphate. And in 2014 and early 2015, it was working. They were growing. ISIS is spreading wider and wider.

Operatives from Iraq and Syria have moved into Libya. They've established training camps. In Libya, they seized a 100-mile stretch of coastline on the Mediterranean facing Europe. They took over an entire city in the Philippines. Boko Haram released an audio message in which he appears to pledge allegiance to the so-called Islamic State.

They were taking in pledges of allegiance from over a dozen countries all over the world. It ties them to the Islamic State and their ideological program of establishing an Islamic caliphate. In places where the existing governments were either non-existent or weak or corrupt, and their promise of a more organized,

a more stable, a less corrupt leadership was able to find an audience. At their peak, this is a group that had territory that rivaled the size of Great Britain, and they governed a population of over 12 million people. So truly, black flags of ISIS are being lifted up on different continents all over the world. All over the world.

Wow. You know, one of the analysts that I've spoken to said to me that ISIS's capacity to govern is more worrying than the capacity of their fighters. But of course. Huck, I wanted to talk about the imposition of the dress code on women. If you're living in the caliphate. I saw a portrait in the street or a painting of a woman.

Even as you're seeing your streets getting cleaner. Covered her face from her head until her toes. Even as you're seeing certain public services being provided better than they ever were before. Women are not allowed to go better than they ever were before. You're also feeling the heavy hand of ISIS. When's the first time you saw the Hizb ut-Tahrir or the religious police? Do you remember? Yeah, they were wearing white uniforms and

a brown kind of, what do you call it? A vest? Yeah, like a vest. And it's written Al-Husba. And pretty soon... No drugs or alcohol or smoking? Of course, yeah. Hizba officers began pulling people aside. If anybody is out there and they get caught,

he would be lashed or he would be, like, punished or everything. They were carrying out public punishments. This is supposedly what Huzaifa did in Syria. Yeah, the same thing happened all over Iraq. Residents describe heavy-handed oppression and brutality under the rule of these Islamic extremists. And the violence just escalated.

The group has released a video purportedly showing the beheading of a Kurdish man in the city of Mosul. First, they're beheading their own citizens, people that they're accusing of being spies of apostasy. We begin with breaking news. Late today, a brutal video surfaced. Then they start decapitating Western journalists.

The video appears to show the 40-year-old James Foley on his knees in an orange prison jumpsuit with his executioner next to him, holding a knife in his left hand. If I see, like, a gathering or something, I would, like, run double time. I don't want to be next to them. I don't want to hear them. I don't want to be next to them. I don't want to hear them. I don't want to see any of their things, actually. I can't seriously look at it. Adulterers are being stoned to death.

Thieves are having their hands cut off. They began to take suspected homosexuals to the top of tall buildings. These stills, dated March 2015, purport to show a man being thrown from a building. Where they were blindfolded, their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were thrown to their death.

His alleged crime, being gay. So it was all depression to me and my children as well, because they were kept in my house. In the entire two and a half years, I would say it's only like 30 times that we went outside. So basically you became prisoners of your home. Yeah. And over time,

the violence got more and more creative, if I can use that word, and frankly, weird. Like, they took a captured soldier. They made him stand bound in front of a tank.

And drove the tank over him. The tread crushing. He made him stand bound in front of a tank and drove the tank over him. The tread crushing, you know, this poor man. And they're just filming all this? Yeah, they're creating slickly produced propaganda videos out of many of these. They took the members of a tribe that revolted against the Islamic State. They were put inside of a cage. The cage was lowered inside a body of water. And they had cameras on them as these people who were chained inside the cage drowned.

In another, they took people inside of a slaughterhouse. In another, they took people inside of a slaughterhouse and they hung them from the ceilings like animals and slit their throats and let them bleed out. Wow. Yeah. We were so, how do I say it, subjugated by them. So anything they say, we just like comply directly without any hesitation. Why this level of violence?

Why is there this kind of grotesque bloodlust? This is hard to talk about without, I think, upsetting people. So, on the one hand, when you see these videos, they're so disgusting and so savage that the first thing you want to do is to say, this is evil. These are sociopaths. These are monsters.

Right. The thing that is lost in all of that is that this is evil. These are sociopaths. These are monsters. Right. The thing that is lost in all of that is that this is strategy. And what exactly does that mean? It's a couple of things. Number one, what they'll tell you is that this is God's law. This is really important to them. This is basically the fundamental underpinning of what they claim to be doing. So even in their most horrific videos, if you take the time to look at the transcripts,

what you'll see is that they spend an enormous amount of time providing a religious justification for what they're doing. of time providing a religious justification for what they're doing. So, for example, that horrific video that shows a man being crushed underneath the treads of a tank. If you go and look at the transcript, you'll see them explain that the victim, the person that is being killed, is himself a former tank operator for the Syrian military. They then cite the principle of kassas. This is a principle in Islamic jurisprudence. It's an eye for an eye, basically. You do this to me, I do this to you. And so they then justify it. He killed people with tanks, we are also going to kill him with a tank. I see. Right? But secondly, they are also aware that they are now in control of a huge stretch of land

where presumably a lot of people didn't want them to be there. Right? And so they use the violence as a form of intimidation. Throughout the caliphate, they set up

open-air theaters, screens. They were set up in marketplaces, in traffic circles, even in schools. And on a continuous loop, they were showing the most horrific videos. And so you were, wherever you turned in the caliphate, you were constantly being reminded of what happens to you if you stand up to the Islamic State. you if you stand up to the Islamic State. The third aim with all of this grotesque violence is I think their most ambitious. And that is that they believe that through these

spectacles of violence, this theater of savagery, they are going to terrorize the enemy. they are going to terrorize the enemy. And they're going to terrorize the enemy into both letting them exist as a state, and eventually they're going to terrorize the enemy into accepting their way of life. But this is also where I think you see ISIS's hubris. I've long wondered if they had just stuck to a caliphate that was only in Iraq and Syria without doing any attacks in the West. I wonder if you and I would

still be talking about that caliphate now, about that territory now. But instead, they put more and more emphasis on these attacks overseas. And eventually, it was this strategy of violence, it was this constant drumbeat of attacks that in the end forces the West to reengage in a way it really didn't want to. Boots on the ground by American, British, and French troops, a coalition of countries that come together to try to root ISIS out.

Look, right ahead of us is a house that's been destroyed in an airstrike. You can see the pancaked roof completely flat, right? When you see that, that means that the coalition believed that there was an ISIS fighting position or some sort of ISIS presence in that moment. Yeah, it's completely destroyed. But it's really sad when you see houses which have been destroyed like this. If ISIS is defeated today, your city will be liberated. Does that make you happy? Actually, it's a really complicated question.

Because now, military liberation is about to be completed. But we're going to talk about civilians, we're going to talk about infrastructure, we're going to talk about houses, a total city that has been destroyed. And this is not going to be considered as a victory. So I don't know whether I should be happy or should I be sad. The way I feel, I can't really feel that happy. Iraq State TV says Mosul battle to end within hours. Yeah, hours saying 48 hours, 72 hours, that's what they mean.

So we drove and drove and drove all day, and the whole time I was checking my phone, I had a map of where the Iraqi military was positioned in Mosul. And I was watching this little island of land that ISIS still held shrinking and shrinking. Nothing today. Okay. Okay.

And then to complicate things, we were told that there's a media blackout. Reporters were not being allowed in at all. And so at the end of the day, not having been able to go inside, we checked in with our sources to see where things stood. It's not over yet. And... Not today. ISIS managed to get through the day.

That evening, we were driven to an abandoned house that was on the outskirts of western Mosul. I would say about six miles from the first checkpoints going into the hardest hit part of the city. You are from America? Yes. It's a house that has been commandeered by the Iraqi army. And they've put some of their soldiers inside here, but mainly they're using it to house local journalists. Let me ask you, have you personally suffered from ISIS?

My cousin was killed by ISIS. He was in the Iraqi army. So we spent the evening, you know, talking to them, swapping stories. We have dinner. You and I debriefed. Today's been kind of, you know, a hurry up and wait day. We drove all the way here. It was, what, more than three hours to get here? Maybe four. And then we waited for the colonel

who was supposed to take us to the front. I think he will take us there tomorrow. But we're cutting it awfully close. If the city falls tomorrow, then we'll have basically one day on the ground. Did you find anything new out about why they have this ban? Like, they're not letting anyone in?

One theory is that it is too dangerous. And just, I think, yesterday, a group of Iraqi journalists somehow got separated from the soldiers they were with and got mooned inside a building and were literally surrounded by ISIS. I think overnight, two of them were killed and the others made it out today. So it might be the danger. And as it was getting late, we started to get ready to bed down.

But it was just so hot and really so loud in the house that you and I and Hulk, a couple of other members of our team decided to go up onto the roof. We dragged a couple of foam mattresses up there, we put down our sleeping bags. And I remember just

looking at the stars and thinking about the fact that this particular patch of sky has witnessed so much. And tomorrow is going to be another notch in the lifeline of Mosul, a pretty important one, the day perhaps that ISIS is defeated. And it's going to be our job to explain what that looks like to the world. And that was pretty humbling to think of that

as we fell asleep. For the next few weeks, you'll be hearing Caliphate unfold on the daily every Saturday, with Chapter 8 coming next Saturday, June 9th. We're also releasing Caliphate as a standalone series, and we're publishing new episodes on Thursday afternoons, two days before you'll hear them on the daily. So if you want to listen early, you can subscribe to the series by searching for Caliphate on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. And for Time subscribers, we're making episodes available a full week early, We're making episodes available a full week early, so if you're a subscriber, Chapter 8 is available right now at nytimes.com slash caliphate.

That's nytimes.com slash c-a-l-i-p-h-a-t-e. If you've been looking for a reason to subscribe, now might be a good time.