The surrealism of war against Isis

The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got under way in Mosul, it was late October. Western journalism was already departing on a bold new chapter, with great new villains much closer to home. For news consumers, one tableau of confusion and anxiety cross-dissolved into the next.

Fortunately, James Verini, a reporter for the New York Times magazine, was on the ground in Mosul, still working to bring closure to the previous nightmare. But that’s no easy task when ‘you’re usually sitting in some house or truck, or squatting behind some berm, listening to the destruction’, as he confides early on in They Will Have to Die Now. ‘Experientially, war is mainly sound.’

War also ‘consists largely of waiting for war’, which is very boring. In the meantime, there are the soldiers to hang out with: American special forces, typically sequestered in ‘a tight, wordless cluster of MRAPs and JLTVs’; and the much more fun Iraqis, who fatalistically eschew security perimeters, body armour, defensive cover and medical equipment, and do things like don a blue trilby hat and purple scarf at breakfast time (‘He carried them in a rucksack. This was his leisure wear’). One general’s humvee is ‘nested with sofa cushions and tasselled pillows’; another turns his back to sniper fire with a shrug and a wink. But such scenes have been providing light relief in frontline reporting from Iraq for a long time. In one all too honest moment Verini describes meeting his first Iraqi general: ‘I could hardly believe my luck. “Central casting” doesn’t begin to get at it.’

When war isn’t being loud and boring, most modern accounts agree, it’s being loud and surreal. Verini’s book is exceptionally rich in this vein.