Michael R. Gordon - Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump

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To Bernard Trainor, partner and friend

This is a short book about a big war that upended the Middle East, killed tens of thousands of civilians, brought a new wave of terrorism to Europe, led three American administrations to send thousands of troops to a distant battlefield, and prompted the United States to pioneer a new way of war. The military gave the conflict a name that read like it was generated by a committee and never caught on: Operation Inherent Resolve. Most people simply know it as the campaign against the Islamic State and by the names of its signature battles: Mosul, Raqqa, Kobani, Ramadi, Sinjar, Tabqa, and Baghuz.

Numerous books have chronicled the rise of ISIS and of its diabolical leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This book is different. My focus is on the American-led campaign, whose members were known somewhat grandly as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. It is an intricate, dramatic, and largely untold story of policy wars in Washington and actual wars on the battlefieldone with important and hard-won lessons.

The campaign, waged principally from 2014 through the end of the caliphate in 2019, was unforeseen at the White House, where President Barack Obama presided over the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 and avowed repeatedly that the conflict there had been brought to a responsible end. Once the battle was joined, however, the objective Obama established in September 2014 was unambiguous: the United States and its partners would degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State.

From its inception, this was no mere drone campaign in which targeted killings were directed by pilots a hemisphere away. But neither was it 1991s Desert Storm, in which General Colin Powells overwhelming force chased Saddam Husseins Republican Guards away from Kuwait after weeks of day-and-night bombardment. Rather, it was a bloody but politically low-risk form of war. What emerged by fits and starts was a strategy that relied principally on the use of proxy forces in Iraq; the recruitment of new forces in Syria, where none existed; the careful placement of American advisors; and the prodigious use of American and allied firepower in both countries: artillery, surface-to-surface missiles, attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships, and an armada of warplanes, ranging from tank-killing A-10s, stealthy F-22s, and Predator drones to lumbering B-52s. It was the new face of Middle East warfare for a United States that had grown weary of sacrificing so many of its own in seemingly unending confrontations with militant groups. The generals had a name for the unorthodox way of waging war: it was a by, with, and through strategy, in which operations were carried out against a common foe by a diverse array of local allies, with support from American forces and their coalition partners, and through a U.S. legal and diplomatic framework. U.S. forces had worked with proxies before, but never on such a scale or with such intensity.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump proclaimed that he had a secret plan to supplant this approach, throw away the old rules of engagement, and finish off ISIS. But as commander in chief, he essentially continued the Obama strategy. As his predecessor did in the case of Osama bin Laden, Trump presided over a raid that cornered and killed a top terrorist leader: Baghdadi. But also as with bin Laden, that operation did not end the movement, and the policies Trump put in place as the campaign wound down opened a new phase of competition for influence in the region among Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel while undermining Washingtons ability to shape the outcome.

I observed much of this war firsthand on the battlefield and in the command centers as a correspondent for The New York Times. Later, as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, I spent more years peeling back the veneer of official Iraqi and coalition statements and boastful claims by ISIS. My effort to get at the truth led me to a Kurdish paramilitary force whose members brought me with them in November 2015 when they forged a path down a rugged mountain to retake Sinjar in western Iraq. It also took me to the October 2016 battle for East Mosul, where the Peshmerga from the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq allowed me to embed with their fighters. After ISIS struck back with suicide bombers in Kirkuk, I rushed there to interview combatants and civilians. Iraqs elite Counter Terrorism Service took me to their front lines during the battle for West Mosul in April 2017, and again in July for the climactic fight for the area known as the Old City.

I was also able to travel with Lieutenant General Steve Townsend, the commander of the American-led task force that helped the Iraqis retake Mosul, and Colonel Pat Work, who led the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne and advised Abdul Amir Rasheed Yarallah, the head of Iraqs counter-ISIS fight. On two occasions, I crossed the border into Syria, visiting Tabqa, which American-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters wrested from ISIS in May 2017, and command centers in the northeastern part of the country, where I met some of the senior leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces and their commander, General Mazloum Abdi.

Along the way, I visited the American-led air war command center in Qatar, the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, operations in Jordan, and U.S. military command centers in Baghdad, Erbil, and Kuwait. Trips in the region with Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretaries Ashton Carter and Jim Mattis, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leader General Joseph Votel, and senior State Department envoy Brett McGurk also gave me a look into diplomatic and military operations. I fleshed out the story with extensive reporting in Washington.

I was not able to interview Baghdadi or his top ISIS lieutenants, but I talked with Sunnis who were rescued from an ISIS prison in Hawija, Iraq; visited refugee camps near Mosul; studied the militants texts; and learned about the inner workings of the caliphate from Western officials familiar with allied intelligence.