Undaunted by close calls, Iraqi soldier returns to battle Daesh
Even by the dramatic standards of Iraq’s battle against Daesh in western Mosul, soldier Mohamed Selman Methboub had a very big day
As the Iraqi military intelligence officer drove a Humvee in the contested Wadi Hajar district on Tuesday, a Daesh sniper shot his turret gunner square in the forehead, killing him immediately. Misan was a close friend.
His team left the area, only to be interrupted by a distress call that prompted Mohamed to turn and drive back to aid an American armoured vehicle stuck in a ditch and under mortar and sniper fire. During the rescue, Daesh sniper rounds smashed into Mohamed’s windshield and engine, but his team managed to pull the US rig out and guide it to safety.
“I didn’t leave the Americans until I arrived in Hamam Al Alil,” says Mohamed, referring to a safe staging area just south of Mosul. He recounted the incident just hours later, as I met him late in the evening by the roadside near an Iraqi base in Qayarrah, 40 miles south of Mosul. A hug of greeting — we have known each other since 2002, when The Christian Science Monitor started following his family as it dealt with the effects of the Iraq war — produces a puff of battlefield dust from his uniform of digitised camouflage.
“One of their [Iraqi] translators, when we arrived, he kissed me from here to here,” the usually softspoken Mohamed said, laughing as he gestured from cheek to cheek.
“I swear by God I saved their lives,” he said, suddenly sober, noting that the US Army colonel in charge of the American unit also sought him out to express his gratitude.
Mohamed’s day of extreme loss and gains comes as Iraqi forces take high casualties as they advance on the warren of roads in western Mosul. They aim to deliver a deathblow to Daesh’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, which was announced in June 2014 after Daesh militants crossed from Syria and seized one-third of Iraq in a lightning offensive.
A military intelligence officer since 2006, Mohamed threw himself back into the fight last year after barely surviving a Daesh ambush in 2014 — exemplifying the passion and unmistakable fearlessness some Iraqis are bringing to the grinding battle to extract Daesh from its last urban stronghold in their country.
The Mosul offensive began last October with a 100-day push that liberated the eastern side of the city, on the east bank of the Tigris River.
“Progress is very good, is very strong,” says the Iraqi officer, referring to the second phase of the fight. “Actually, we try to finish the battle as soon as possible.”
On the day we met, he says he counted the corpses of 17 Daesh fighters, most with identity cards marking them as Russian nationals, from Chechnya and Dagestan, and one from China.
Overall, the Daesh bodies that his unit has found in Mosul are 60 per cent Iraqi, and 40 per cent foreigners, says Mohamed.
Our meeting is brief: We quickly try to catch up while sitting in an SUV pulled over on the side of the street, beside the closed stalls of the Qayarrah market. Ambulances with lights flashing pass by repeatedly. Mohamad is returning at 4am, in just a few hours, to Wadi Hajar — the same district where he just lost his turret gunner.
The thrust to capture western Mosul began on February 19, with an estimated 750,000 civilians still living in that congested part of Iraq’s second city, which at its peak was home to more than two million people. The United Nations said on March 2 that those in the west “remain largely inaccessible to humanitarians, sheltering from the fighting, or waiting for an opportune time to flee.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) estimates that 191,800 people are still displaced by the fighting — the bulk of the 255,708 that have been cumulatively displaced since October — with 85 per cent living in camps or emergency sites.
Civilians have been caught in the crossfire, too. Since October, some 1,776 received trauma care in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, UN figures show. From early January to February 22, another 618 civilians were treated for trauma injuries at a surgical hospital closer to Mosul.
But the war will be won on the ever-changing front lines in western Mosul, where, like the eastern side, dilapidated streets show the signs of nearly three years of Daesh rule — jihadist graffiti, and Daesh targets flattened by US-led coalition air strikes. Exit routes to Syria have been severed, and several thousand jihadists are expected to fight to the death using favoured tactics like suicide car bombs, snipers, and, more recently, small quad-copter drones rigged to drop grenades and small explosives.
Mohamed’s unit, which he has belonged to for more than a decade, is a window on the scale of Iraqi casualties, and what motivates those who fight. Mohamed is the personal driver of an Iraqi general — a rank that in most armies would rarely be on the front line itself. And yet, beside losing his turret gunner on February 28, another incident just two days earlier saw an Daesh mortar hit the back of Mohamed’s vehicle, killing two and badly injuring a third member of his team.
Mohamed escaped unscathed — he had briefly moved away from the vehicle — and the general was elsewhere.
“Actually, I lose a lot of vehicles,” says Mohamed matter-of-factly. He had another close call earlier in the Mosul campaign, when an Daesh suicide car bomb destroyed all the vehicles around him, and blackened his own — but left him untouched.
“My life is for God, whether I die or not,” says the Shiite Muslim, whose family is very devout. “I’m a soldier, I think about my country. I’m not in a [sectarian] militia. I’m a soldier. That’s my duty; I have to do it.”
“I am not afraid, because I want to go to fight — either to die, or to live life,” says Mohamed. “So why be scared?”
Not all Iraqi soldiers are so sanguine, or so calm. They are part of force that has been resurrected from the ashes of June 2014, when much of the Iraqi Army disintegrated before the offensive of Daesh fighters crossing from Syria to seize a chunk of Iraq. Rebuilding has taken time, yet Iraq’s security forces have made significant military gains over the past year.
Mosul is the final push. But not all fighters are as committed as Mohamed.
“A lot of friends of mine, when they get home and they take their salary, they don’t want to go back anymore, they say, ‘I quit the Iraqi Army,’” says Mohamed. “They are afraid. They say, ‘I know I will die, so why go to fight?’ ”
Those calculations mean less to Mohamed, for whom this anti-Daesh battle is personal. In that June onslaught three years ago, Daesh ambushed his convoy near the central Iraqi city of Samarra. A fragment from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft bullet tore through his body at the start of a nine-hour firefight, during which Mohamed was forced to man a heavy machine gun even as he nearly expired from blood loss.
Mohamed was one of just three in his truck full of nine soldiers to survive, and the 50-vehicle convoy suffered a host of casualties. He received lifesaving treatment in Baghdad, then more critical surgery in Iran, organised by this reporter and largely funded by a Monitor reader who had long tracked the family’s well being.
Reflecting quietly as we sit in the vehicle near the market, Mohamed recalls how, from his hospital bed in Tehran in mid-2014, he had vowed that he would eventually recover, rejoin the Iraqi Army, and fight Daesh in Mosul.
“I told them that I want to fight. I don’t want to stay in a stable place,” says Mohamed. “That’s why I put my name on the list. I want to fight Daesh. That’s my wish.”
Through his stubble and uneven teeth, Mohamed bears the rounded features and sharp eyes of his mother, Karima Selman Methboub, the matriarch widow of a poverty-stricken Baghdad family whose has raised her eight children alone. At 32, he is relaxed and confident, if slightly heavier and more serious than when I first met him as a teenager.
Interestingly, there is a ritual he engages in before he goes home, where his young family lives with his mother and siblings. Before each break, he stops off at a shop on Baghdad’s Saadoun Street to buy a new uniform. “Do you know why?” asks Mohamed, with a mischievous smile. “Because when my friend, my team is wounded, I carry them, and there’s a lot of blood on my uniform. I don’t want my family to see that.”
What he wants them to know instead, and respect, is his determination to rid Iraq of Daesh militants who have already put him and his family through such pain since 2014.
“Am I happy?” he asks. “Of course. I want to liberate my country.”
— The Christian Science Monitor
Through his stubble and uneven teeth, Mohamed bears the rounded features and sharp eyes of his mother, Karima Selman Methboub, the matriarch widow of a poverty-stricken Baghdad family whose has raised her eight children alone.