9781422277133

I t was a couple of hours past midnight on the morning of October 22, 2015, when thirty US soldiers from the army’s highly trained Delta Force turned out for their mission. They wore the patchy, sand-colored uniforms of desert camouflage, and peered through night-vision goggles that turned the dark- ness into an eerie green landscape. Semiautomatic rifles were slung over their shoulders and first-aid kits were packed in their backpacks. Between them they had years of battlefield training and experience. They knew they were about to get a fight, and they were ready for it. Joining them near the city of Hawija, in northern Iraq, were nearly fifty Kurdish soldiers—known as peshmerga —who were similarly equipped. The peshmerga were from the Kurdistan region, an independent area of about 30,000 square miles (78,000 sq km) located along the northeastern border of Iraq. The US and peshmerga soldiers were close allies, fighting alongside one another in the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, one of the world’s most extreme, powerful, and dangerous terrorist groups. The temperature hovered in the low 70s as the whine of engines and the hypnotic thunking of helicopter blades cut through the early-morning quiet. Crewed and ready, the helicopters waited to take the soldiers to an ISIS- controlled prison about 4.5 miles (7 km) north of Hawija. M ission B riefing

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