a mother and her children fleeing ISIS controlled Mosul

Surviving the Fall of ISIS

As Iraqi and coalition forces invade Mosul, the last ISIS stronghold in Iraq, the grim details of the extremist group’s rule come to light.

Photograph by Moises Saman
This article, originally published on October 16, 2016, was updated on March 21, 2017. It appears in abridged form in the April 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

The Kurdish soldiers stood on a berm, next to a gunner’s dugout, in a corner of their position. It was one of several forward positions on a front line that ran along the crest of a mountainside and faced west onto the Tigris River Valley. The sun had set on a late summer day—the driest season in Iraq, when land and sky seem to merge. Still, through the thickening dark the soldiers could make out, on the river’s near bank, the lights of the city of Mosul. Though this was a vista they could have described in their sleep—for months these soldiers, who were with the peshmerga, the army of Iraqi Kurdistan, had surveilled and mapped and discussed every inch—its

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