They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate Format: Paperback

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2019

“It’s a small miracle that a writer as good as James Verini witnessed the battle of Mosul.… It will take its place among the very best war writing of the past two decades.” ―George Packer

James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis’ last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year. This “urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage” (Patrick Radden Keefe) takes the reader into the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time.

James Verini is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. He has also written for The New Yorker, the Atavist, and other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.