Sept.

20, 2018


 Editors’ Note [Dec. 18, 2020]: In 2018, The Times released a

12-part narrative podcast series called “Caliphate” on the Islamic
State terrorist group and its operations. While parts of the series
involved a broad examination of the group’s tactics and influence,
multiple episodes were driven primarily by the confessional tale
of a Canadian man of Pakistani origin who called himself Abu
Huzayfah and claimed to have been a member of the Islamic State
who had taken part in killings in Syria.
During the course of reporting for the series, The Times
discovered significant falsehoods and other discrepancies in
Huzayfah’s story. The Times took a number of steps, including
seeking confirmation of details from intelligence officials in the
United States, to find independent evidence of Huzayfah’s story.
The decision was made to proceed with the project but to include
an episode, Chapter 6, devoted to exploring major discrepancies
and highlighting the fact-checking process that sought to verify
key elements of the narrative.
In September — two and a half years after the podcast was
released — the Canadian police arrested Huzayfah, whose real
name is Shehroze Chaudhry, and charged him with perpetrating a
terrorist hoax. Canadian officials say they believe that Mr.
Chaudhry’s account of supposed terrorist activity is completely
fabricated. The hoax charge led The Times to investigate what
Canadian officials had discovered, and to re-examine Mr.
Chaudhry’s account and the earlier efforts to determine its
validity. This new examination found a history of
misrepresentations by Mr. Chaudhry and no corroboration that he
committed the atrocities he described in the “Caliphate” podcast.
As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of
“Caliphate” that presented Mr. Chaudhry’s claims did not meet
our standards for accuracy.
From the outset, “Caliphate” should have had the regular
participation of an editor experienced in the subject matter. In
addition, The Times should have pressed harder to verify Mr.
Chaudhry’s claims before deciding to place so much emphasis on
one individual’s account. For example, reporters and editors could
have vetted more thoroughly materials Mr. Chaudhry provided for
evidence that he had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State,
and pushed harder and earlier to determine what the authorities
knew about him. It is also clear that elements of the original fact-
checking process were not sufficiently rigorous: Times journalists
were too credulous about the verification steps that were
undertaken and dismissive of the lack of corroboration of
essential aspects of Mr. Chaudhry’s account.
In the absence of firmer evidence, “Caliphate” should have been
substantially revised to exclude the material related to Mr.
Chaudhry. The podcast as a whole should not have been produced
with Mr. Chaudhry as a central narrative character.
A fuller description of what The Times has learned about Mr.
Chaudhry was published on Dec. 18, 2020.

In the war on terror, who is it that we’re really fighting?

“Caliphate” is a documentary audio series from The New York
Times that follows Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism for
The Times, on her quest to understand ISIS. For more information
about the series, visit nytimes.com/caliphate.
The following is a transcript of Chapter 7. The episode was
released on May 31, 2018. The portions in italics were recorded
outside of a studio or excerpted from archival tape.
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What He Hadn’t Told Me

Watch the Throne: How Joel Coen Came to Make ‘The
Tragedy of Macbeth’

Mosul
Andy Mills: Test, test. 1, 2. O.K., less loud. Hawk, can you sing
me something?
Hawk: [Sings] Careless whisper. What is it? I forgot the words.
It’s for George Michael. I, I like him.
Mills: I like George Michael.
Hawk: Yeah.
Mills: When in Iraq did you first hear George Michael?
Hawk: It was in 1998, I believe.
[Music]
Hawk: I was at home. There was some — this TV, on TV, local
TV, there was some videos, like, Western songs.
Mills: Like, music videos?
Hawk: Music videos, yeah. And there I have it ——
[Music]
Hawk: I was moved by the lyrics, and how it was soft. It touched
my heart, actually. Yeah. But no, my love — Metallica.
[Music]
Mills: Well, then, I guess a better question is, how does somebody
growing up in Mosul fall in love with Metallica?
Hawk: Yeah. Friends of mine in — they were, like, senior in
college — they were like, “There are some guys, some dude
called Metallica. You should listen to him.” So I was like,
“Where to buy any of his records? There isn’t any here in
Mosul.” It was an embargo here, if you remember, at that time,
and everything foreigner or English or American is, like,
something forbidden. They were like, “Keep it on the hush-hush,
but you go to that record shop.”
Mills: It was, like, one record shop?
Hawk: Yeah. In the entire Mosul. And we were so lucky to have
it.
[Music]
Hawk: I was like, hanging in there, and looking at all kinds of,
you know, like, pictures of Western music and everything. And I
was so new to this, so I told them, “Uh, excuse me, do you have
Metallica?” He says, “Yes, of course, which year you want?”
[Laughs] And I was like, “Oh, my God, which year?” I didn’t
know what to ask. I told him, “Just give me some of his best hits.”
[Music]
Hawk: For the first time I played the tape, I was like, “What the
[expletive] is this?” Just all noise and chaos. And he keeps crying
and, you know, like, shouting. But after, like, two or three times I
listened to it ——
[Music]
Hawk: Actually, most of his songs are really sincere.
[Music]
Hawk: It’s about armies and wars and why are we dying in vain
and everything. And since I was born, I have seen nothing in this
country but wars and more wars and more wars.
Mills: Hmm.
Hawk: So I made some kind of connection that stood deep with
me. And from that minute on, I was like ——
[Snap]
Hawk: That’s what I’m looking for.
[Music]
Reporter: The battle has begun to recapture Mosul.
Reporter: This has been an occupation, essentially, by ISIS for
more than two years.
Reporter: It was the largest city in Iraq captured by ISIL fighters.
Now, it’s the only one they have left.
Reporter: This is the beginning of what could be a long battle.
[Music]
Reporter: Nearly nine months of grueling urban warfare has left
Mosul in ruins.
Reporter: ISIS’ hold on the city is down to less than half a square
mile.
Reporter: And so now it’s heavy, urban guerrilla warfare.
[Sound of gunshots]
Reporter: A few thousand ISIS fighters pitted against tens of
thousands of Iraqi troops and the full force of the U.S. coalition.
Mills: Chapter 7. “Mosul.”
[Knock]
[Door creaks]
Rukmini Callimachi: Hey, come on in.
Mills: Good morning.
Callimachi: Good morning.
Mills: So.
Callimachi: So.
Mills: Is it even worth asking how you slept?
Callimachi: Oh, God. This is where we get to see each other’s
PJs.
Mills: Yup, these are my PJs.
Callimachi: This is mine.
Mills: Pretty basic questions this morning. Uh, actually, could
you just start off by telling us — what, what day is it?
Callimachi: It’s Saturday, July 8th.
Mills: 2017.
Callimachi: 2017.
Mills: And where are we?
Callimachi: We’re in Iraq, finally. And basically, Iraqi forces are
poised to take back Mosul. We’re hearing that they’re gonna take
back the city in 24 to 78 hours. That timeline seems to be
somewhat stretchy. It keeps on changing, but no matter what, I
think it’s, it’s somewhat imminent. And after three years of ISIS
holding the second-largest city in all of Iraq, Iraqi forces with
coalition backing are poised to take it back.
Mills: Oh.
Callimachi: Oh, God, here we go. “R.C., just came off of the
phone with A.B.M., and we’re going to aim to leave around 11
a.m. So aim to be ready — you and Andy — for 11 a.m.”
Mills: That mean that we need to be suited up and our bags
packed for, what, an overnight? Just in case?
Callimachi: Yeah. Yeah, just in case.
Mills: And you want me to meet you down in the lobby?
Callimachi: Yeah.
Mills: O.K. All right, if anything changes, just give me a call in
my room.
Callimachi: Yeah, sounds good.
[Music]
Callimachi: All right, let’s do this.
[Car door slams]
Mills: Let’s start with the drive.
Callimachi: Yeah.
Callimachi (in Arabic): Yalla.
Callimachi: So we hop in the car ——
Callimachi: You have maps.me?
Callimachi: We’re in northern Iraq in the safe zone, where we’re
staying in a hotel.
Mills: How long is our drive?
Hawk: Two hours.
Callimachi: And ——
Hawk: Two hours thirty.
Callimachi: We are trying to get to western Mosul, to basically
the last holdout that ISIS had. I had a tip about a building that was
in that area that I knew had been the headquarters of the Hisba
under ISIS. And I just knew that if we could get there — I mean, I
thought that if we could get there right when it was liberated, we
would find the mother lode of documents.
Alla (in Kurdish): New York Times de Americia.
Mills: What’s this?
Hawk: It’s a checkpoint.
Callimachi: In the car ——
Alla (in Arabic): Assalamu alaikum.
Callimachi: We have our amazing driver, Alla.
Callimachi (in Kurdish): Chawani.
Soldiers (in Kurdish): Bashi.
Callimachi (in Kurdish): Bashi.
[Chatter]
Callimachi: They know me?
Hawk: She’s an old customer, he says.
Callimachi: She’s an old customer! [Laughs]
[Sound of car horn]
Callimachi: We also have two security advisers. One of them is
Iraqi.
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: And then we’ve got our international security
adviser.
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Hawk: Now she’s putting on her headgear.
Callimachi: You want me to talk about putting on the hijab?
Mills: And then, there’s Hawk.
Callimachi: Yeah.
Mills: How do you want to be identified? Hawk?
Hawk: Of course, yeah.
Mills: I actually ended up spending quite a bit of time with Hawk.
Callimachi: Yeah.
Mills: Sitting with him in the back seat.
Mills: What did your parents do?
Mills: I learned a lot about him.
Hawk: My mother was a teacher. My father used to be in the
army.
Mills: I learned that he loves both George Michael and Metallica.
Hawk: I started writing poetry. I don’t know, it just came to me,
an inspiration or something.
Mills: But you’ve known him a lot longer than I have. How is it
that you would describe Hawk?
Callimachi: Oh, Hawk. Um ——
Hawk: [Arabic]
[Laughter]
Callimachi: Hawk is my translator and fixer.
Hawk: The first time that I did this, like this, Rukmini.
Callimachi: And he’s also my friend.
Hawk: And he’s just like, “What?”
[Laughter]
[Music]
Callimachi: He’s really funny.
Hawk: To train your eyes?
Callimachi: Oh, my God. Like, half the time I’m with Hawk,
we’re laughing.
Hawk: [Explicit].
[Laughter]
Callimachi: He’s a fabulous translator.
Callimachi: What’s the phrase in Arabic, Hawk?
Hawk: [Arabic]
Callimachi: He’s very methodical in terms of providing me
accurate information, providing me good translation.
Callimachi: [Arabic]
Hawk: [Arabic]
Callimachi: [Arabic]
Callimachi: He’s a native Mosuli.
Mills: Where’d you grow up?
Hawk: Eastern Mosul.
Callimachi: He’s born and bred in Mosul.
Hawk: I am a descendant of these great-great-grandfathers.
Callimachi: And what a lot of people don’t get about Mosul ——
Hawk: If we can go back a little bit in history ——
Callimachi: Is that this is, in a way, one of the most ancient cities
in world.
[Music]
Hawk: We used to have all types of cultures and religions in our
province.
Callimachi: The area in which Mosul is located is mentioned in
the Old Testament. Its history dates back thousands of years.
Hawk: And they were the ones who started writing, the very first
ones.
Callimachi: It was near Mosul that one of the tablets on which
the Epic of Gilgamesh was written was found. This is considered
the earliest work of literature.
Hawk: Supposedly, our grand-grandfathers, they mobilized the
very first wheel in history.
Callimachi: It’s also a modern city. It was the economic hub of
the region. There was a major university. And if you were to walk
through its warren of lanes, you could easily stumble upon villas
that could have been airlifted out of Santa Barbara. Manicured
lawns, orange trees, lemon trees. And running through the heart of
the city is the Tigris River.
Hawk: Yeah, and the best place when I want to clear my mind,
and if I’m, like, upset or something, I would go directly to the
riverbanks. Maybe sometimes I go for a dip and then go out. And
just by looking at the river, you see how magnificent the feeling
are — the feelings will be. They will take all the stress out of you
out of no time.
Callimachi: But Mosul, like the rest of Iraq, paid a heavy price
under the increasingly tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein. He
dragged the country into conflict after conflict. The eight-year
Iran war, the incursion into Kuwait. And this, in turn, led to
sanctions that impoverished the Iraqi people, and ——
George W. Bush: My fellow citizens.
Callimachi: Then, in 2003 ——
Bush: At this hour ——
[Music]
Callimachi: The U.S. invaded Iraq.
Bush: American and coalition forces are in the early stages of
military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to
defend the world from grave danger.
Hawk: Yeah, actually, in 2003, it wasn’t the final examinations
yet, in college, and the Americans came and took over in Iraq.
Callimachi: At that point in time, Hawk was just getting ready to
graduate from university, and he remembers welcoming U.S.
forces and being hopeful that ——
Hawk: We’re gonna rebuild, we’re gonna do this and that.
Callimachi: It would be the start of an even further
modernization of Mosul and of Iraq overall.
Hawk: I was, like, looking at Japan, Germany, and I was like,
thinking to myself, “They’re gonna build some bases here, and
we’re gonna flourish.” I mean, as a country.
Callimachi: But actually, what happened ——
Reporter: A suicide bombing has just taken place.
Callimachi: Car bombs.
[Sound of explosion]
Callimachi: Suicide attacks. Targeted assassinations.
Reporter: Five more Americans were killed in action today.
Hawk: And it keeps getting worse and worse.
Callimachi: And pretty soon, it had devolved into a chaotic
ground war.
[Siren]
Reporter: At least 18 people were killed in Iraq after a car bomb
exploded at a crowded Shiite funeral.
Callimachi: That chaos was the perfect soil for a growing
insurgency. The insurgents were at first fighting the American
invaders — the crusaders, as they called them. But very soon,
they also turned on fellow Muslims. They began targeting the
Shia sect, saying that they were not true believers, that they had
rejected the true faith.
Mills: This is, like, al wala wal bara.
Callimachi: Exactly.
Mills: Yeah.
Callimachi: Al wala wal bara. Because, keep in mind, the leader
of the insurgency was a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He
was the founder of the group that goes on to become ISIS. And
according to files that were just recently declassified by the
C.I.A., he was in Mosul as early as 2003. And there, he began
laying the groundwork, recruiting followers, recruiting fighters
and building cells inside the city.
[Music]
Callimachi: So year after year, as the chaos engulfs the nation,
this little group that begins with just a few dozen fighters grows.
They’re gaining ground. They’re gaining acolytes and followers.
Barack Obama: Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of
our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.
Callimachi: And when the U.S. finally pulls out, and the last
soldiers leave Iraq in the final weeks of 2011 ——
Obama: After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be
over.
Hawk: They pulled off leaving Iraq much more devastated than
before.
Callimachi: They hand over Mosul to the Iraqi military and to
corrupt officials and to these underground cells that were, in some
ways, lying in wait all along.
Hawk: They shouldn’t have. Anyhow, then comes ISIS in no time.
Callimachi: And by the summer of 2014, ISIS had reached the
outskirts of Mosul with what people say was just a few hundred
fighters. They sent word to their supporters inside.
Callimachi: So can you tell me just personally ——
Hawk: Yes.
Callimachi: What were you doing, basically, the day that ISIS ...
Callimachi: And then, they ambushed the city.
[Music]
Hawk: There were massive gunshots everywhere. I can hear it
even in my neighborhood. And then my friend called me and he
said, “My neighborhood has fallen.” I told him, “What?” He
said, “All the security forces are pulling out.”
Callimachi: Hawk gets a worried phone call from a friend of his,
and the friend is saying, “Do you think the city is going to fall?”
Hawk: I told him, “O.K. It’s gonna be O.K. No, no problem.” He
says, “No, no, you don’t understand.”
Callimachi: And Hawk advises his friend that no, this is nothing.
Hawk: Security forces were everywhere. Streets were, like,
crawling with security forces, with their equipment, everything.
Callimachi: There are thousands of Iraqi troops in and around the
city. They have Humvees. They have sophisticated rifles. They’ve
been fully equipped by American forces.
Hawk: So we were saying, “It’s a bunch of terrorists, and they’ll
be eliminated soon.”
Callimachi: He, like many of the people in Mosul, and probably
like most of Iraq, had no sense — absolutely no sense — that the
city could fall.
Hawk: So I was like, “Eh, it’s gonna be solved the next
morning.” To my surprise, I took a sleep, and I woke up at 5
o’clock in the morning. My father said, “Don’t go out!” I was
like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “All the security
forces have moved out.” But I told my father, “I want to see
what’s going on.” So I walked out on my rooftop.
[Music]
Hawk: I saw, by my own eyes, Humvees were burning. The
compounds, army compounds, were burning. It’s all been on fire.
Fires were everywhere.
Reporter: Another major piece of what America fought for in
Iraq was lost today.
Reporter: The fight proving too much for the U.S.-trained Iraqi
soldiers.
[Sound of gunshots]
Reporter: In Mosul today, we saw sporadic gunfire and burning
military vehicles. The insurgents seized police stations, banks and
government buildings.
Reporter: Some reportedly discarding their uniforms,
abandoning their military armored vehicles and weapons.
Reporter: It could take weeks or longer for Iraqi troops to
recapture the city of Mosul.
[Music]
Mills: So in this timeline, ISIS takes over Mosul in June. They
declare their caliphate from there in July. And then what?
Hawk: First, there was this kind of wathiqat al-madina.
Callimachi: Very soon, within, I would say, the first week of
their arrival ——
Hawk: “Wathiqat” is like pact, or city terms, if we can say.
Callimachi: They began positioning people in traffic circles, and
they were handing out a pamphlet, or a flier, to people through the
windows of their cars.
Hawk: It was first on loudspeakers, and then it was on fliers.
They were used on fliers, and ——
Callimachi: The pamphlet was something called the charter of
the city.
Hawk: So this is what we have, we were abiding by.
Callimachi: And it laid out, in a constitution-like form, both the
new rules under which the population would now be governed,
and ——
Hawk: And they were saying that we are coming here in peace.
We want you all to be equal. All the security forces are to hand
over their weapons and to say their repentance.
Callimachi: Their promise to the people. Their promise was, you
have lived under these infidel regimes. You have seen what a
disaster it’s been. Now you’re going to see a huge difference with
the Islamic State. Corruption is not going to be allowed. They are
now going to live in a virtuous society and that they are going to
see the fruits of that virtue as a result of their citizenship in this
caliphate.
[Music]
Callimachi: So can you just explain to him what I’m doing?
Hawk: [Arabic]
Callimachi: So before you and I came to Mosul, Hawk and I had
traveled to a bunch of different towns, not just Mosul, but to the
town of Tel Kaif, north of the city, to the Nineveh plains, to the
town of Nimrud ——
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: And in all of these locations, we spent a lot of our
time speaking to people who had spent years living under ISIS.
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: And time and again, the thing that Hawk and I kept
hearing is that ISIS was actually addressing some of the
longstanding grievances they had had with the previous Iraqi
government.
Hawk: So he said, “I used to work in the sidewalk stand — buy
chicken, fresh chicken.”
Callimachi: So, for example ——
Callimachi: In a sidewalk stand selling chicken, yeah?
Callimachi: One day, Hawk and I were in a town north of Mosul,
where we met a guy who sold chickens on the side of the street.
He told us about how one day, a customer came to him, he picked
out a chicken, asked him to slaughter it. He did. When he handed
over the chicken, the customer opened his wallet and said, “I’m so
sorry, I only have half the money.”
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: The merchant accepted the money on the
understanding that this guy would pay him back, and then, week
after week, the guy refused to pay him back.
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Hawk: [Arabic]
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: So the amount of money that this guy was stiffed
was literally a couple of dollars. And he explained to me that
under the Iraqi government, he wouldn’t have bothered to put in a
police report, because the bribe he would have had to pay would
have been probably more than the amount of money he was trying
to recuperate. But under ISIS, he said that he went to their police
station. The ISIS policeman took down the complaint. He didn’t
take a bribe. He sent out one of his officers to investigate. They
found the guy who hadn’t paid, and within a couple of days, they
got the guy to pay up.
Mills: Hmm.
[Music]
Callimachi: We went to a couple of small towns where people,
for as long as they remember, they’d never been able to have
more than four, five, maybe six hours of electricity a day. And
they said that ISIS came in, and they sent a committee of
electrical engineers to go study the problem, and they fixed it.
Now, you couldn’t turn on all of your appliances at the same time.
You couldn’t use air-conditioners or big things like that. But
people now said that 24/7, around the clock, they could at least
turn on the lights.
Callimachi: How was garbage collection during the time when
ISIS was there?
Callimachi: And one of the near universal things ——
Unidentified Speaker: Good.
Hawk: Thumbs up.
Callimachi: That people told Hawk and I ——
Callimachi: Can she compare before ISIS and then when ISIS
came, what the garbage collection — how it changed?
Callimachi: Is that the streets were cleaner.
Unidentified Speaker: After, good.
Callimachi: And this is the thing where, to this day, I don’t think
people understand this. It was a functioning society. It was a
functioning state. It was not recognized by anybody, but in some
ways, they usurped and did better than the government that they
replaced. And that’s pretty ——
Mills: That’s crazy.
Callimachi: Crazy. Yeah.
[Music]
Callimachi: Except if you’re in ISIS. This is a group that has
always known how to mine local grievances and use them to their
advantage. They’re trying to grow this global caliphate. And in
2014 and early 2015, it was working. They were growing.
Reporter: ISIS is spreading wider and wider.
Reporter: Operatives from Iraq and Syria have moved into Libya.
They’ve established training camps.
Callimachi: In Libya, they seized a 100-mile stretch of coastline
on the Mediterranean, facing Europe.
Mills: Hmm.
Callimachi: They took over an entire city in the Philippines.
Reporter: … militant group Boko Haram released an audio
message in which he appears to pledge allegiance to the so-
called Islamic State, or ISIS.
Callimachi: They were taking in pledges of allegiance from over
a dozen countries all over the world.
Reporter: It ties them to the Islamic State and their ideological
program of establishing an Islamic caliphate.
Callimachi: In places where the existing governments were either
nonexistent or weak or corrupt, and their promise of a more
organized, a more stable, a less corrupt leadership was able to find
an audience. At their peak, this is a group that had territory that
rivaled the size of Great Britain, and they governed a population
of over 12 million people.
Mills: So truly, black flags of ISIS are being lifted up on different
continents all over the world.
Callimachi: Yeah. All over the world.
Mills: Wow.
Callimachi: You know, one of the analysts that I’ve spoken to
said to me that ISIS’ capacity to govern is more worrying than the
capacity of their fighters.
Mills: Hmm.
Callimachi: But, of course ——
Callimachi: Hawk, I wanted to talk about the imposition of the
dress code on women?
Hawk: Yes.
Callimachi: If you’re living in the caliphate ——
Hawk: I saw a portrait in the street or a painting of a woman
——
Callimachi: Even as you’re seeing your streets getting cleaner
——
Hawk: Covered her face from her head until her toes.
Callimachi: Even as you’re seeing certain public services being
provided better than they ever were before.
Hawk: That women were not allowed to go out unless they have a
veil.
Callimachi: You’re also feeling the heavy hand of ISIS.
[Music]
Callimachi: When’s the first time you saw the Hisba, or the
religious police? Do you remember?
Hawk: Yeah, they were wearing white uniforms and a brown kind
of — what do you call it?
Mills: A vest?
Hawk: Yeah, like a vest. And it’s written “al-Hisba.”
Callimachi: And pretty soon ——
Callimachi: No drugs or alcohol or smoking.
Hawk: Of course, yeah.
Callimachi: Hisba officers began pulling people aside.
Hawk: If anybody is out there and they get caught, he would be
lashed, or he would be, like, punished or everything.
Callimachi: They were carrying out public punishments.
Mills: This is supposedly what Huzayfah did in Syria?
Callimachi: Yeah, the same thing happened all over Iraq.
Reporter: Residents describe heavy-handed oppression and
brutality under the rule of these Islamic extremists.
Callimachi: And the violence just escalated.
[Music]
Reporter: The group has released a video purportedly showing
the beheading of a Kurdish man in the city of Mosul.
Callimachi: First they’re beheading their own citizens, people
that they’re accusing of being spies, of apostasy.
Reporter: We begin with breaking news. Late today, a brutal
video surfaced, showing an American ——
Callimachi: Then they start decapitating Western journalists.
Reporter: The video appears to show the 40-year-old James
Foley on his knees in an orange prison jumpsuit with his
executioner next to him, holding a knife in his left hand.
Hawk: If I see, like, a gathering or something, I would, like, run
double-time. I don’t want to be next to them. I don’t want to hear
them. I don’t want to see any of their things, actually. I can’t,
seriously, look at it.
Callimachi: Adulterers are being stoned to death. Thieves are
having their hands cut off. They began to take suspected
homosexuals to the top of tall buildings.
Reporter: These stills, dated March 2015, purport to show a man
being thrown from a building.
Callimachi: Where they were blindfolded, their hands were tied
behind their backs, and they were thrown to their death.
Reporter: His alleged crime — being gay.
Hawk: So it was all depression to me — I, and my children as
well — because they were, they were kept in my house. In the
entire two-and-a-half years, I would say it’s only, like, 30 times
that we went outside.
Callimachi: So basically, you became prisoners of your home.
Hawk: Yeah.
Callimachi: And over time, the violence got more and more
creative, if I can use that word — and, frankly, weird.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: Like, they took a captured soldier.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: They made him stand, bound, in front of a tank, and
drove the tank over him.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: The tread crushing, you know, this poor man.
Mills: And they’re just filming all of this.
Callimachi: Yeah. They’re creating slickly produced propaganda
videos out of many of these.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: They took the members of a tribe that revolted
against the Islamic State. They were put inside of a cage. The
cage was lowered ——
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: Inside a body of water. And they had cameras on
them as these people who were chained inside the cage drowned.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: In another, they took people inside of a
slaughterhouse, and they hung them from the ceilings like animals
and slit their throats and let them bleed out.
Mills: Wow.
Callimachi: Yeah.
Hawk: We were so — how do I say it — subjugated by them. So
anything they say, we just, like, comply, directly. Without any
hesitation.
Mills: Why this level of violence? Like, why is there this kind of
grotesque bloodlust?
Callimachi: This is hard to talk about without, I think, upsetting
people. So, on the one hand, when you see these videos, they’re
so disgusting and so savage that the first thing you want to do is
to say, “This is evil. These are sociopaths. These are monsters.”
Mills: Right.
Callimachi: The thing that is, that is lost in all of that is that this
is strategy.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Mills: And what exactly does that mean?
Callimachi: It’s a couple of things. Number one, what they’ll tell
you is that this is God’s law. This is really important to them.
This is basically the fundamental underpinning of what they claim
to be doing. So even in their most horrific videos, if you take the
time to look at the transcripts, what you’ll see is that they spend
an enormous amount of time providing a religious justification for
what they’re doing.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: So, for example, that horrific video that shows a man
being crushed underneath the treads of a tank, if you go and look
at the transcript ——
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: You’ll see them explain that the victim, the person
that is being killed, is himself a former tank operator for the
Syrian military.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: They then cited the principle of qisas. This is a
principle in Islamic jurisprudence. It’s an eye for an eye,
basically. You do this to me, I do this to you.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: And so, they then justify it: He killed people with
tanks. We are also going to kill him with a tank.
Mills: I see.
Callimachi: Right? But secondly, they are also aware that they
are now in control of a huge stretch of land where, presumably, a
lot of people didn’t want them to be there, right?
Mills: Right.
Callimachi: And so they use the violence as a form of
intimidation. Throughout the caliphate, they set up open-air
theaters. Screens — they were set up in marketplaces, in traffic
circles, even in schools. And on a continuous loop, they were
showing the most horrific videos.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: And so you were — wherever you turned in the
caliphate, you were constantly being reminded of what happens to
you if you stand up to the Islamic State.
[Sound from ISIS video]
Callimachi: The third aim with all of this grotesque violence is, I
think, their most ambitious. And that is that they believe that
through these, these spectacles of violence, this theater of
savagery, they are going to terrorize the enemy. And they’re
going to terrorize the enemy into both letting them exist as a state
and, eventually, they’re going to terrorize the enemy into
accepting their way of life.
[Music]
Callimachi: But this is also where, I think, you see ISIS’ hubris.
I’ve long wondered, if they had just stuck to a caliphate that was
only in Iraq and Syria without doing any attacks in the West, I
wonder if you and I would still be talking about that caliphate
now, about that territory now. But instead, they put more and
more emphasis on these attacks overseas. And eventually, it was
this strategy of violence, it was this constant drumbeat of attacks
that, in the end, forces the West to re-engage in a way it really
didn’t want to: boots on the ground by American, British and
French troops, a coalition of countries that come together to try to
root ISIS out.
[Sound of car]
Callimachi: Look, right ahead of us is a house that’s been
destroyed in an airstrike. You can see the pancaked roof
completely flat. Right? When you see that, that means that the
coalition believed that there was an ISIS fighting position or
some sort of ISIS presence in that building.
Mills: Yeah, it’s completely destroyed.
Hawk: But it’s really sad when you see houses which have been
destroyed like this.
Mills: If ISIS is defeated today, your city will be liberated. Does
that make you happy?
Hawk: Actually, it’s a really complicated question. Because now,
military liberation is about to be completed. But if we’re gonna
talk about civilians, if we’re gonna talk about infrastructure, if
we’re gonna talk about houses, a total city that has been
destroyed — and this is not gonna be considered as a victory. So
I don’t know whether I should be happy or should I be sad. The
way I feel, I can’t really feel that happy.
[Music]
Callimachi: Iraq state TV says Mosul battle to end within hours.
Hawk: Yeah, hours — saying 48 hours, 72 hours, that’s what
they mean.
Callimachi: So we drove and drove and drove all day. And the
whole time I was checking my phone, I had a map of where the
Iraqi military was positioned in Mosul. And I was watching this
little island of land that ISIS still held shrinking and shrinking.
Callimachi: Yeah. Nothing today? O.K. O.K.
Callimachi: And then, to complicate things, we were told that
there’s a media blackout. Reporters were not being allowed in at
all. And so, at the end of the day, not having been able to go
inside, we checked in with our sources to see where things stood.
Callimachi: I’ve spoken to everybody and, um, it’s not over yet.
Callimachi: And ——
Callimachi: Not today.
Callimachi: ISIS managed to get through the day.
[Car door closes]
Callimachi: That evening, we were driven to an abandoned house
that was on the outskirts of western Mosul.
Unidentified Speaker: [Arabic]
Callimachi: I would say about six miles from the first
checkpoints going into the hardest-hit part of the city.
Iraqi Journalist: You are from America?
Mills: Yes.
Callimachi: It’s a house that has been commandeered by the Iraqi
Army, and they’ve put some of their soldiers inside here, but
mainly they’re using it to house local journalists.
Callimachi: Can I ask you, have you personally suffered from
ISIS?
Iraqi Journalist: My cousin was killed by ISIS. He was in Iraqi
Army.
Callimachi: So we spent the evening, you know, talking to them,
swapping stories.
Iraqi Journalist: Almost all of us that’s in this room ——
Callimachi: Has a story like this.
Iraqi Journalist: Yeah.
Callimachi: We have dinner.
Mills: Could you just give me a rundown of a few things that
happened today and what you hope happens tomorrow?
Callimachi: You and I debriefed.
Callimachi: Well, today’s been kind of, you know, a hurry-up-
and-wait day. We drove all the way here. It was, what, more than
three hours to get here? Maybe four? And then, we waited for the
colonel, who was supposed to take us to the front. I think he will
take us there tomorrow. But it’s — we’re cutting it awfully close.
If the city falls tomorrow, then we’ll have basically one day on
the ground.
Mills: Did you find anything new out about why they have this
ban? Like, they’re not letting anyone in?
Callimachi: One theory is that it’s, it is too dangerous, and just, I
think, yesterday, a group of Iraqi journalists somehow got
separated from the soldiers they were with and got marooned
inside a building and were literally surrounded by ISIS, I think
overnight. Two of them were killed, and the others made it out
today. So it might be the danger?
Callimachi: And as it was getting late ——
Callimachi: Do you think tomorrow Mosul will be liberated?
Callimachi: We started to get ready to bed down, but it was just
so hot and really so loud in the house that you and I ——
Mills: You going out?
Callimachi: And Hawk, a couple of other members of our team,
decided to go up onto the roof.
[Night sounds]
Callimachi: We dragged a couple of foam mattresses up there.
We put down our sleeping bags. And I remember just looking at
the stars and thinking about the fact that this particular patch of
sky has witnessed so much. And tomorrow is going to be another
notch in the lifeline of Mosul.
[Music]
Callimachi: A pretty important one. The day, perhaps, that ISIS
is defeated. And it’s gonna be our job to explain what that looks
like to the world. That was pretty humbling, to think of that as we
— as we fell asleep.