09/23/2019
Journalist Verini debuts with a vivid chronicle of the 2016 battle to recapture Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from the Islamic State. Noting that “in wartime, truth is inseparable from rumor, and in Iraq, history is always cut with conspiracy,” Verini sketches the millennia of global conflicts that have shaped Mosul, from its founding as the Assyrian capital of Nineveh to its conquests by, among others, Alexander the Great, Sulamein the Magnificent, and U.S. Army general David Petraeus. For Mosul’s citizens, Verini says, international fears of a terrorist caliphate obscured a raft of more quotidian concerns, including the Islamic State’s “galling” ban on smoking. Reporting from the front lines, Verini documents how an unlikely coalition of Iranian-aligned militias, American special forces, Iraqi army units, and Kurdish Peshmerga collaborated to free the city after two and a half years of ISIS dominion. Shia militiamen, Verini writes, “looked as though they’d been kitted out at some urban unisex martial athleisure boutique,” while his fellow foreign correspondents’ “shallowly shocking coverage existed somewhere on the same spectrum as the Caliphate’s own blood-porn.” Readers interested in war journalism and Iraq’s future prospects will be drawn to Verini’s sardonic humor and sharp eye for detail. (Oct.)
"Superb.… Verini has provided us, at great physical risk, and with impressive intellectual rigor, a map of the complex factors that determined—and still determine—our success or failure against groups like ISIS in Iraq."
Phil Klayn Affairs Journal
"They Will Have to Die Now is a vivid, captivating, compelling, and graphic account of the major battle against the Islamic State in Iraq, the Battle for Mosul…James Verini conveys brilliantly the often tragic ancient and modern history of Iraq, and he captures superbly the brutal reality of one of the most intense urban battles since WWII. In so doing, he describes the terrible hardships experienced by the Moslawis and both the worst and the best of mankind in war."
Gen. David Petraeus (US Army
"[A] deeply reported, beautifully written first-person account."
Foreign Affairs - Anne Barnard
"James Verini plunges you into the heart of the climactic battle of the Iraq War and won’t let you leave. He seems to be everywhere, gets to know everyone, vividly chronicles everything he sees and hears—and never once calls attention to himself. The weapons may be new—drones and iPads and executions on YouTube—but the blood and confusion and betrayal are as old as war itself. They Will Have To Die Now is an astonishment."
"A deadly accurate, richly illuminating, profoundly saddening work."
"A painful, moving, and necessary read… Verini is almost recklessly brave. He embedded himself, whenever he could, with virtually every kind of allied unit fighting ISIS, and he found himself in the middle of the action, constantly. He was present when the snipers opened up, when the car bombs came, and when the mortars fell. (And) because he was so brave — because he spent days, weeks, and months with the men who fought — he was able to capture the truth of war in Iraq (and of Iraq itself) in a way that precious few writers have. In fact, he helped me to make more sense, over a decade later, of my own deployment."
National Review - David French
"A necessary book… Verini’s front-line reporting is exhilarating."
"With the eye of a novelist and a historian’s sweep, James Verini tells a moving, gripping, complexly layered story of Mosul, from the private calamities of its present to the buried dynasties of its past."
"The definitive account of one of the most pivotal and bitter military campaigns of the modern era…This isn’t typical military history, though, but an eyewitness account of what happens to ordinary people who find themselves living on the battlefield, the compromises they must make to stay alive…This is war reporting at its very best."
"[James Verini] has written not only a deeply human account of the conflict but also a fascinating historical investigation of Mosul itself."
"Most war reporters pay short visits to the front lines, grabbing images and stories that shock us and, at their best, sketch a few details of the larger story. Great ones, like Verini, immerse you in the danger and horror and thrill and black comedy of these places with novelistic detail."
"This is such an important and deeply nuanced book. Verini paints absolutely convincing portraits of the Iraqi soldiers trying to take their broken country back, and in humanizing them, he joins the ranks of Liebling and Pyle and Gellhorn—American journalists able to embed so selflessly with soldiers, to listen first and theorize rarely, to tell a story as it happened. He does us and the Iraqis trying to rebuild, after decades of catastrophic war, a service."
"James Verini’s book stands comparison with the pathbreaking works of modern war journalism that meld into great literature. One has to go back to the Vietnam War and Michel Herr’s Dispatches to find such a vivid, poignant, and historically grounded narrative of an appalling war; a war caused no little by the misdeeds, missteps, and malevolence of the myriad powers and forces that have tried to dominate the Middle East."
"A vivid and bare-knuckles account of the fight against ISIS."
"Verini’s firsthand account of the Battle of Mosul is a thing of terrible beauty."
"They Will Have to Die Now is an exceptional study both of modern war and of the most significant battle in the war against Islamic State. I read each page with relish and gratitude."
Times (UK) - Anthony Lloyd
"An urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage, in the tradition of Michael Herr and Philip Gourevitch. His account…captures the horror, the nobility, and the sheer grinding absurdity of twenty-first-century warfare…A significant achievement."
"This is a stunning book, brave in its reporting and beautiful in its writing. It is funny and sad and seared into me, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, not just to people interested in the truth of a war but to anyone in search of the truth of humanity."
"A necessary book… Verini’s front-line reporting is exhilarating."
"(An) eloquent, awesome account."
"Verini offers up a searing account of the battle against the Islamic State in Mosul in 2016 and 2017, focusing not just on the clashes with the jihadi fighters but also on the plight of the people caught in the middle of the battling forces ... Verini presents with sensitivity the bloody and complicated history of the area, the fraught feelings Iraqis have towards America and its involvement in their country, and the way conflict with the Islamic State has ripped families apart. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand this ongoing and tragic conflict."
"They Will Have to Die Now is the story of what happened after most Americans stopped paying attention to Iraq. It’s a small miracle that a writer as good as James Verini witnessed the battle of Mosul. His book is erudite, humane, bleakly funny, and unbearably sad. It will take its place among the very best war writing of the past two decades."
"Superb.… Verini has provided us, at great physical risk, and with impressive intellectual rigor, a map of the complex factors that determined—and still determine—our success or failure against groups like ISIS in Iraq."
American Affairs Journal - Phil Klay
★ 2019-08-07
Coming from Brooklyn, George Polk Award-winning journalist Verini—a National Geographic contributing writer and frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine —was determined to serve a kind of "penance" when he arrived in Baghdad in the summer of 2016 for the first time; he was ashamed that he had been "too scared" to go to Afghanistan fresh out of college after 9/11. This time, he traveled in the wake of the Iraqi army as it moved on IS, which had captured Mosul two years before and declared a triumphant caliphate led by insurgent Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Throughout the taut narrative, Verini brings us vivid and often heartbreaking stories of everyday Iraqis, occupied and humiliated for eons, enduring yet another war "that nevertheless would not be happening, at least not in this way, if not for the American war that preceded it." The invasion of Mosul was conducted by the Counter-Terrorism Service, which "had put the first real puncture in the [IS] defenses" in 2016, as well as multiple divisions of the Iraqi army, the Iraqi federal police, and international forces. The official end of combat, in Mosul, occurred in July 2017. Verini's account is startlingly candid and informed, and the author has clearly benefited from some years of distance. He manages to effectively convey the complicated mess on all sides: American, Iraqi, IS. After the months of fighting, Mosul "looked as though a vindictive god had wiped his hand across the city." In the battle, writes the author, "twelve hundred Iraqi soldiers were killed," and while "no one will ever know how many civilians died, it was certainly in the thousands."
A deeply thoughtful boots-on-the-ground work about a topic that many of us have stopped thinking about.
