MOSUL, Iraq—When ISIS terrorist group militants in Mosul discovered that Ahmed’s brother had served in the army, they went to his house, pulled him into the street, and shot him dead as his parents watched.
Now, it was time for revenge, and after two years of ferrying the extremists around as a taxi driver, Ahmed had plenty of information to offer special forces at a command post in an east Mosul apartment on Friday.
“They’re in this church, and only God knows what goes on in there,” he told intelligence officers, pointing out map coordinates during a half-hour session. They met in a living room used to receive residents just a few blocks away from the battle, some seeking help, others being questioned, while the unlucky ones faced interrogation or stern reprimands for various infractions. Ahmed asked his full name be withheld for fear of reprisals.
With heavy weapons less useful in the dense urban alleyways of Iraq’s second city, local intelligence is growing in value. Special forces on the front lines are beefing up efforts to win civilians’ trust, passing out food and medicine and gleaning real-time information about the extremists they are fighting in pitched, house-to-house combat.
In doing so, officers are also taking on classic counterinsurgency roles, becoming actors of local governance, addressing grievances and dispensing swift battlefield justice.
The offensive to free Mosul of ISIS terrorist group militants is now in its second month, and progress has slowed as troops try to avoid mass civilian casualties that could give the impression the Shiite-heavy military was riding roughshod over the city’s majority Sunnis.
While tens of thousands of civilians have fled the fighting, over a million remain in their homes—some following official requests by the government to stay there, others preferring the risk of crossfire to spending the winter as an anonymous number in cold displacement camps.
In the Bakr neighborhood, parts of which are still contested, civilians lined the streets. Smiling children waved and greeted the troops, while younger men and elders watched convoys of Humvees pass with an air of skepticism.
Automatic rifle fire and heavy machine guns blasted all day from both sides, while mortars lobbed shells across neighborhoods, the city’s relentless soundtrack. In the dusty wasteland to the east, a family pushed a relative’s body on a cart back toward an aid station.
Part of the intelligence gathering is rough—in the Samah neighborhood, soldiers arrested at least two suspected IS militants, wrapping T-shirts over their heads and beating them in the street as they dragged them off. Not every combatant shares the government’s optimism that sectarian reconciliation can happen here. “Why do you speak to them? They’re all (ISIS terrorists),” one soldier said of civilians leaving homes to visit relatives further from the crossfire.
