Shatter the Nations by Mike Giglio

Author:Mike Giglio [Giglio, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

DEATH COMES TO YOU

Sinjar, Iraq. November 2015.

THE YOUNG SOLDIER PAUSED TO TAKE A SELFIE ON THE BATTERED street. The peshmerga had just cleared ISIS from the town of Sinjar, but as his comrades fired bursts of celebratory gunfire, Azhar Khalaf Shamo wasn’t smiling. He was a Sinjar native, a Yazidi, and he knew this street—he stood in front of what had been a family-run store. Now the entire block was rubble and metal scraps, like all the rest. “It’s totally destroyed,” Shamo said. “No place looks like before.”

Sinjar had been ISIS territory since the young ISIS field officer known as Okab, or Eagle, stormed it a year earlier in the surprise attack that initiated the Yazidi genocide. Freeing Sinjar was meant to mark a turning point in the U.S.-led campaign to roll back the caliphate. The peshmerga, feeling redeemed, rolled through the town in a convoy of tanks and pickups, honking. I was walking with a column of peshmerga. U.S. airstrikes had been pounding Sinjar for days, and the soldiers stepped around collapsed buildings and downed power lines. An officer told them to keep to the middle of the street for fear of IEDs hidden in the jumbled roadside. The street was webbed with tangled wires. “Don’t touch them, don’t pull them,” a soldier shouted.

Shamo was a Yazidi volunteer with the peshmerga. He looked dazed. He’d lost seven siblings to ISIS’s rampage. At least 3,000 Yazidis were still believed to be in ISIS captivity. Childhood memories lingered as he walked: where I saw a pile of rubble indistinguishable from the rest, he saw a corner store where as a kid he’d bought ice cream. He stopped at another pile, the home of a man who’d seized the chance to take a Yazidi woman prisoner on the day ISIS arrived. “This was our neighbor,” he said.

“I just came here to ease some of my pain,” he continued. But the closure he’d hoped to find by returning as part of the liberating forces was proving elusive. “Yes, it is liberated. But how can we come back?”

That night, I joined a group of tired reporters at a hotel in Dohuk, the Kurdish city closest to Sinjar, and found myself wondering if the momentum of the war might finally be shifting. The road through Sinjar had been a key supply line for ISIS, linking Mosul and Raqqa, and disrupting it would set ISIS back on other fronts. Sinjar was also a symbolic victory for the peshmerga and their American allies. Kurdish officials had even promoted a hashtag for the battle: #FreeSinjar. With the battle won, the coalition would turn its attention to Mosul, preparing a major offensive to take the city where the caliphate had started.

I woke up the next morning and grabbed my phone to check the weather and learned that ISIS had launched a massive terrorist attack in Paris overnight. Militants had carried out coordinated strikes across the city, killing 130 people in a series of shooting rampages and suicide bombs.

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