Lieutenant Ahmed Abbas Ali burns his finger as he lights the fuse on his chunk of C-4 plastic explosive. A momentary flash of pain pushes aside all thoughts of the car bomb. He's bent over a battered white Chevrolet saloon containing several canisters of explosives wired to an incredibly sensitive pressure trigger. Ali had defused two nearby improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the past half hour, cutting the wires of bombs half buried by the roadside. This one, though, is too dangerous to tamper with. It is one of Daesh's newest and most dangerous IEDs, the same design that had killed several of his comrades over the past few months. So he decides to blow it up.
The car is parked on a quiet street in west Mosul's Islah al-Zarai, a middle-class district of two- and three-storey houses sprawled behind concrete walls. Iraqi forces had retaken it from Daesh a fortnight previously there was still fighting nearby. Some local residents had already returned to their homes. Others never left.
The dozen or so soldiers acting as an escort to Ali's four-strong explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) unit hammer on metal gates along the street, shouting orders to clear the block as men, women and children emerge squinting into the fierce June sunshine. An officer radioes in the co-ordinates to a command post and, in brisk Arabic, requests permission to detonate.
"Are there civilians?" comes the response.
"Yes but we've warned them all and secured the roads."
"OK. Begin."
Ali, a 23-year-old with a neat moustache, thick eyebrows and customary camouflage cap, produces a brown stick of pliable C-4 from his trouser pocket, then takes a multitool and slices off a piece the size of a child's fist. He cuts a short test length of white fuse, lights it to check it's not damp and tosses it to the pavement, where it fizzes for a few seconds. Satisfied, he takes a 30-centimetre section - enough to burn for around a minute - and attaches it to a detonating cap pushed into the plastic explosive. Last come three bottles of drinking water, which he and a comrade position around it with a large roll of sticky tape.
With the area cleared, Ali walks towards the Chevrolet and attaches the package to its boot, where the expanding water will activate the trigger. A team-mate pulls their Ford pickup close and keeps it running as he sparks a plastic cigarette lighter and holds it to the fuse. He was careful not to swear when it flared up and scorched his middle finger; it's the holy month of Ramadan, when cursing is forbidden. His mind snaps back to the job and he runs for the pickup, the fuse burning faster than he anticipated. They accelerate hard towards a breeze-block and corrugated-iron fruit shop, where the other men have already retreated.
Suddenly, a youth on a scooter appears, driving blithely towards them. Ali and his men scream at him to stop. He comes to an abrupt halt as the IED explodes with a thud that rattles the roof.
The soldiers wait for any stray pieces of shrapnel to land, then walk back to what's left of the wrecked Chevrolet. Flames and thick black smoke pour out. The street is cracked and blackened. The car lets out a series of small pops and bangs, so they back off, shrug, return to their vehicles and drive back towards their base. "That," Ali said later, "was a quiet day."
In Iraq and Syria, Daesh exists somewhere between a standing army and an insurgent force. When the group swept across northern Iraq in a shock offensive midway through 2014, its men captured military vehicles as well as vast stores of arms and munitions. But as the war has raged on, they have also become adept at fielding adapted or self-made weapons thanks to nimble research teams with a genius for terrible new forms of death and the mass-production capabilities to realise them. Iraqi security forces, underfunded and undertrained, have not had the resources to adapt at an institutional level. Instead, troops and police units have improvised, learning new techniques and modifying equipment to counter their adversaries.
EOD teams are at the forefront of this new arms race. IEDs are one of Daesh's most devastating weapons and, as government forces fight to expel the militant group from Iraq - most recently in the successful Mosul offensive, eight months long at the time of our visit - its bomb makers have produced ever more complex and lethal creations. In Mosul, the attacking troops found booby-trapped explosives at every stage, from wide approach roads and rural villages to built up urban areas. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory in the city on July 10 after almost nine months of devastating fighting, but Daesh remains dangerous even in defeat. Every door, window, side street and vehicle will have to be checked and cleared. Meanwhile, the jihadists still cling on elsewhere in the country, where they are expected to employ the same tactics.
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Ali begins his morning by inspecting a recently captured Daesh explosives factory in a house with a bullet-pocked green façade. It faces a central intersection that coalition warplanes had bombed into mounds of earth and mangled vehicles. Ragged white flags hanging from nearby buildings indicate the presence of civilians, but the only signs of life are two soldiers surveying the scene from wooden chairs wedged under the shade of a ruined truck.
The unit searches the surrounding area first and, after a short time, find an IED next door to the factory, its detonator linked to a mobile phone. They are not surprised. "Most of the houses here are booby-trapped now," Ali says.
Debris litters the front garden, where a warped gate and awning frame lay among the paraphernalia of explosive manufacturing. There are mixing bowls for the ingredients and piles of components next to protective gloves and work boots. The ground shines silver with powdered aluminium added to the explosive blend to enhance its blast.
Inside, it is dim, with sandbags piled into exposed windows and floral curtains drawn over the others. Daesh had manufactured rockets here and completed versions encased in launch tubes are piled on to metal racks in the front room.
They, too, are a recent innovation, designed to be mounted on a long-time favourite weapon: suicide car bombs. Vehicle-based IEDs have claimed hundreds of Iraqi lives, but soldiers became more adept at dealing with them.
At first, Iraqis targeted the driver and engine, so Daesh applied armour plating thick enough to stop small-arms fire. More recently, troops began to rely on tanks, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) or heavily armoured bulldozers to destroy or block the attackers. Within the past month, the EOD team tells me, Daesh had started using mounted rockets on its vehicles' roofs to help drivers blast their way through to a target. "We see many car bombs with these now," Ali says. "If one of these hits a bulldozer it will split it in two."
He and his team begin to clear the factory, loading the weapons and explosives on to the bed of a flatbed truck for disposal later.
There is another workshop across the wrecked intersection, so they head there afterwards, passing an unexploded suicide car bomb with its front half encased in sheet metal. The heavy thud of a large explosion sounds a couple of blocks away as they walk. A massive cloud of smoke plumes into the air from an apparent airstrike, but nobody looks up to check.
The second workshop is set up in a former rotisserie chicken restaurant, opposite a crudely spray-painted Daesh flag and containing the same tangle of ingredients, components and tools. Plastic purple flowers hang in one of the corners, overlooking dozens upon dozens of suicide belts, mine casings, screws to be used as shrapnel and more sacks of explosives.
The team carries out as much inventory as it can, stacking the truck until the creaking suspension can take no more.
In the sometimes low-tech struggle for superiority on Iraq's battlefields, Daesh are not the only ones who have been forced to modify their vehicles. The following afternoon, I visit a huge walled compound on the southern approach road to western Mosul. The guards outside sport the distinctive blue naval-style camouflage of Iraq's federal police - the heavily armed force more akin to the military than law enforcement - that has played a major role in the fight for the city.
Inside are portable buildings for the 60-strong force who work there and a series of bays made from rusted supports strung with camouflage netting, which offer little respite from the 42°C heat. At one of these workstations, labelled "Gearing" with a hand-painted sign, Sergeant Major Qayis Natik, 32, oversees a group of engineers tinkering with a Humvee.
Natik wears blue overalls with a black skullcap. Sweat and dust cake his brow. He had been a blacksmith before joining the federal police in 2012 and, once in uniform, his skills were quickly needed. Iraqi government forces tend to fight mounted, staying in or close to their vehicles where possible. The vast majority rely on armoured Humvees, which are ubiquitous on the roads, checkpoints and frontlines of Mosul, painted according to their owners: sand for the army; black for special forces; blotchy blue for federal police; and dark green for their affiliated rapid response units.
American troops first brought the vehicles here during the 2003 Iraq invasion and quickly discovered that they were vulnerable to both insurgent IEDs and RPGs. Faced with spiralling casualties, the US Army replaced them with hulking, mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs). For the considerably less well-funded Iraqi forces, this was not an option.
Iraq's Humvees are fitted at the point of manufacture with an armour package that will stop most small-arms fire. Initially this seemed sufficient, but Daesh began to discover the vehicle's weak points, targeting wheels or engine blocks and sometimes throwing grenades into their open turrets.
Natik and others like him tried to help. He explains the modifications made to the vehicle in front of him as one of his men welds damaged sections. "First, we armoured the tyres to avoid snipers, then we put an armoured plate on the radiator and a hole to make sure that the hot air still escapes." More plating now encloses the turret, leaving only a small opening for the gunner. The modifications are now fairly standard for the unit and carried out using sheet metal bought from local merchants.
They had done bigger jobs, too, such as refurbishing vehicles captured from Daesh or armouring bulldozers and frontloaders with tonnes of metal. Natik takes particular pride in a Humvee that he turned into a hardened repair-and-recovery truck, with a huge steel box on the back and a cable on the bonnet thick enough to haul anything the engine can move. He added silhouettes of eagles cut from a skid plate and the words "Victory comes from God" to its rear doors.
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As he talks, a small Kurdish army captain wearing a spotless uniform and mirrored aviators looks on patiently, occasionally glancing at a gold watch that is so large it swamps his wrist. His Humvee had been badly damaged as he tried to rescue civilians at a front-line position the previous day, he explains, so he was waiting for the workshop team to repair it.
The captain explains how Daesh deliberately and accurately fired at a joint on the armoured windscreen. "My Humvee was made in 2015 and the weak point is around there," he says. "Yesterday, Daesh just targeted that."
The group retires for lunch soon afterwards. In deference to Ramadan, they explain, it would be a light meal, sitting down to bowls of beans and meat with huge plates of rice as well as yoghurt and salad.
Relaxing with a smoke afterwards, one of the workshop's senior officers, 38-year-old Major Ali Mohammed Madawi, describes the intellectual conflict that his unit wage with the enemy. "As Daesh discovered our weak points, the men brought them here and we fixed them," he says. "The process is gradual and step by step. We armour [one], then they target a new weak point."
He suggests hopefully that they had now covered all of the Humvee's major vulnerabilities and so "Daesh would now be defeated". At the time it seems optimistic, given the group's relentless search for new ways to take Iraqi lives.
The EOD team's base lies west of the city amid the dust storms, barely-there roads and mud-brick villages that stretch out to the Syrian border. Here, patrolling British and American soldiers encountered regular ambushes from extremist militants in the post-invasion years, and the area was often described as a hotbed of insurgent support. Much of it is now deserted, the population having fled before the arrival of troops and allied coalition of mainly Shia militias known as the Popular Mobilization Units. So the anti-mine group have repurposed rubbish-strewn houses close to a marshy offshoot of the Tigris.
There are two units there, each around 30 strong and working under the command of the Iraq 9th Armoured Division's engineering corps. They are not locals and many, including the moustachioed Captain Ali, are from Baghdad, rotating in for 15 days before taking a week off back home.
The unit has worked through almost every stage of the battle against Daesh, including the recent brutal combat in Baiji and Ramadi. In Mosul, they often moved out ahead of the frontline, clearing a way for the advance so close to Daesh that "If they throw a stone, it would be on our heads," as one man put it. They carried guns and grenades in case they were ambushed. They often were.
But many of the duties consist of clearing the vast amount of booby-trapped IEDs left behind by the militants. The unit's unofficial motto is "From sunrise to sunset". They often arrive to inspect a house first thing in the morning and go on to defuse device after device until the light fails them.
They do not work with the stringent safety constraints, protective gear and remote-control vehicles employed by the American and Australian militaries that trained them. This is partly because most possess "specialised equipment" that begins and ends with a cheap, humble multitool (Leathermans are rare and sought-after here) but also because of the sheer number of devices they have to deal with every day. Operating like their western allies would have taken far longer, with the effect of hindering the army's advance.
This bravery costs them dearly. Almost 20 men have been killed since the start of the Mosul offensive alone, and others maimed, losing legs or suffering severe spinal injuries. Most of the unit estimate that there was not a man among them who had not been wounded at some point. They are all intimately familiar with explosives and spend some of their downtime studying the newest iterations of Daesh's bombs, examples of which they store near their quarters in a desolate house with a wrecked yellow taxi that had ploughed through its garden wall.
The house holds a number of explosively formed penetrators, paint pot-sized devices with a thick metal lid that transform into armour-piercing warheads. Next to them sit lines of bombs stuffed into water pipes which had been buried next to pressure plates. There are also the dissembled components of a suicide belt: a cloth and metal casing; a pile of yellow ammonium nitrate-based explosive; and some wire and ball bearings. A squad member appears from the house wearing boxer shorts and a vest, then begins to reassemble it for my benefit, smoking casually. He scoops the explosives into the belt with his hands, tapes it up and slots in the detonation cap with a length of fuse before slicing off a separate section and lighting it to demonstrate how fast it burns.
"Don't worry," he says, noticing me glancing with some alarm at the glowing cigarette that was dangling from his mouth. "It won't set them off."
Ali enrolled in the unit a year ago, part of a steady intake of new recruits required to keep numbers up. He tried not to dwell on the shockingly high attrition rates. "If you think about this and make yourself scared, you won't be able to do anything," he tells me quietly. "The most important thing is morale."
Ali's commander is Captain Hasham Ali Ibrahim, who, at 27, is one of the oldest in his unit, and, according to his superiors, one of the best. Relaxing in an AC/DC "Hells Bells" T-shirt when I meet him, he looks like a teenager.
Ibrahim joined in 2012 after requesting a position with an EOD squad. The pull was partly, he says, the opportunity to save people's lives, but also because he had heard there were relatively few officers and, as a result, more opportunities for job advancement. It was soon clear that this was because few of them lasted long. Between my first and second visits, they'd lost one man and several others had been injured. Of the men who made up the unit when Ibrahim started, there were now just five left. The rest had been killed, wounded, or, in some cases, quit in an attempt to avoid the same fate.
Five years ago, Daesh was yet to appear in its current incarnation, but its precursor organisations were well established in Iraq and had perfected horrifyingly effective IEDs. Ibrahim usually encountered three different types, activated by either tripwires, pressure plates or mobile phones. "Most of them were easy to deal with," he remembers. But as he and his colleagues became better and faster at neutralising the bombs, the insurgents simply surged forward, making them more complex.
The process accelerated when Daesh seized Mosul and formed its self-declared caliphate in 2014. EOD teams began to encounter increasingly advanced explosive devices, triggered by movement or a shadow cast across them.
Daesh hid them better, too, under entrance-hall tiles, inside generators, fridges or cupboards, usually rigged to blow up if they were touched or lifted. They began to encounter the new pressure sensors found in the Islah al-Zarai car bomb around a year ago. Five of the unit had since been killed attempting to defuse them.
Ibrahim moves deliberately now. "I'm not in a rush. When I find an IED, I check it, I look at how it works and then, when I understand, I start to work," he says. "When I see that the way is very complicated, that is when I blow it up with C-4."
That may be one of the reasons why he is still alive. But he has nonetheless narrowly avoided death on many occasions. He reels off a list of stories. Once he tried to shift a jerrycan full of explosives with a rope, causing it to detonate and blow a hole in the ground as deep as his waist. Another time he trod on a pressure switch while making his way up a hill and set off a device just three metres away. The deafening, blinding blast threw him back but he avoided the worst of the explosion. In shock, he rushed down towards his colleagues. "I didn't know if I was alive or dead, so to make sure I ran and shouted, 'Am I dead? Am I dead?'" he says, flashing a still, quick smile.
One day, Ibrahim was working in the Christian town of Qaraqosh, which was taken by Iraqi forces early in the Mosul offensive and saturated with IEDs. By mid afternoon he was exhausted, so took a brief rest while two of his men walked further up the road to deal with more devices. They were engulfed in a huge explosion a few seconds later. "When it happened, I saw a head blown away from the rest and I realised my team had died," he says. The smoke and debris cleared to reveal the other man sheared in half at the chest.
He does not remember exactly what happened next but he headed out into the heavily mined area. "I started acting crazy and walked out into the IEDs," he says. "I cut wire after wire until I could get to my team and dragged them back."
As well as new types of IEDs and triggers for them, Daesh has also developed new delivery methods. In October 2016, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters working alongside French special forces soldiers spotted and shot down a drone near the town of Dohuk, north of Mosul. This was not an unusual occurrence: militants had long used them for observation, so the Kurds scooped it up to take to their base. As they did so, explosives inside the craft detonated, killing two of them and injuring two Frenchmen. They were the first known casualties of Daesh's drone war.
When the offensive began in earnest, Iraqi forces quickly began to report weaponised drones, many of which were commercially available, Chinese-made quadcopters modified to drop explosives. The usual load was a grenade fitted with custom plastic fins. Daesh made and dropped grenades in large quantities, sometimes with lethal accuracy. Propaganda videos show them landing inside Humvee turrets and, on one occasion, killing a tank commander.
Other armed groups, for example in Ukraine, have deployed consumer, unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare (see WIRED 03.17), but Daesh was the first to do so at scale - and weaponised. At first, Iraqi forces struggled to respond, relying on rifles and machine guns to shoot down the tiny mobile targets. But the federal police copied the technology as best as they were able, using Daesh's tactics against them.
They developed a specialised unit equipped with the kind of craft available on Amazon or eBay for as little as £1,500. It consisted of four-man squads with their own control truck and assigned to work alongside a specific ground unit. They moved around depending on deployment but by June, Daesh territory had shrunk so much that most stayed parked outside a forward base in the city's west bank reinforced with green sandbags.
The drones are in the air constantly, returning only to swap batteries. Inside the wood-laminate interior of one of the vans sits First Lieutenant Ali Talib, 35. His eyes are fixed on one of two large flatscreen TVs mounted each side of a digital clock.
The display shows a grey, ruined street leading to a roundabout. It is difficult to make out detail clearly, as there is no zoom facility on the drone camera and they have to keep above 200 metres when over Daesh territory to avoid small-arms fire.
Tiny figures clutching assault rifles suddenly appear on the screen, darting across the street from building to building.
"We have movement," Talib murmured.
More men follow, then a motorbike races towards the roundabout.
"They're moving to attack our units," he says, grabbing a nearby Samsung tablet displaying the drone's location on a map of the area. He writes down the co-ordinates on a red Post-it Note, then radios the details to the nearest frontline unit.
"I see many things in my days here," he says, piloting the drone back to its base. "There are always Daesh fighters passing from place to place, car bombs and snipers. I always pass the co-ordinates on."
The drone unit added grenades to their craft in early 2017, closely following the pattern established by Daesh. Instead of plastic fins, they affixed shuttlecock feathers to the grenades to improve accuracy. "We adjusted the drones ourselves," Talib says. "Then we killed Daesh with them."
Inside the forward base, senior officers monitor the teams from a control room lined with green floral-print sofas along three walls and a bank of five televisions streaming drone camera feeds. A sixth screen is tuned into the local Iraqiya channel's news report and alternates between footage of frontline clashes and pieces on Donald Trump.
The technology is basic but effective, saving the lives of civilians and soldiers alike, according to a friendly major reclined on a sofa. "From here," he says, "we can identify the target and tell if it's military or civilian. These are our eyes. If Daesh wants to sneak into our units, we can see them from here."
After Ali's team detonates the car bomb, they start out towards their base, trucks still laden from the explosives factories. Once they pass the outskirts, they detour off into the desert on a grey gravel track through the open sands. They drive for a few minutes before arriving at a pit worn deep by a series of explosions. They come here every few days to dispose of captured Daesh munitions and deactivated bombs.
They unload the trucks - IED canisters, mortars, rocket tubes, magnetised bombs, sacks of explosives - then pile them into the hole. Again, they rig C-4 to a fuse, this time one that would burn far longer than a few seconds. They then drive off, not stopping until a huge plume of smoke begins to rise into the air. The blast can be felt from more than a kilometre away.
Finally, back at the base, they rest. The EOD unit observes the Ramadan fast strictly and a day of heat and exertion with no water or food has left them exhausted. Most lie down and sleep, others chat about work, families or fallen comrades.
Some of the men get by on faith, others on gallows humour, joking over who took the biggest risks and would die first or noting that explosives have little respect for ranks. "At least death by IED is quick," one tells me, even though their many gravely wounded comrades testified that it was not.
Ali sits on a mattress next to Ibrahim, his boyish boss, as a battered air-conditioning unit in one of the windows struggles against the heat. The room is a mess, its red carpet almost completely obscured by clutter. Clothing, bomb components and watermelons are piled high in the corner.
They talk of home. Ibrahim has two wives in Baghdad and a child by each of them. "When I die," he says with a laugh, "I will leave lots of children behind me." He shows me a video of his 18-month-old daughter running to the door after hearing that her father was coming back from duty.
Ali sits cross-legged and sucks his singed finger reflectively. He had put off marriage for now, declining to think of a future beyond the unit. "This job is dangerous," he says when I asked him why. "I don't want to bring a woman into my life then be killed and leave her without a man."
He lays still for a moment, then turns to sleep, waiting until sunset, when they would finally be able to break their fast. Tomorrow, they would have to work again. And perhaps this time, it would not be quiet. In July, Daesh was pushed out of Mosul but for the Iraqis, for now, the fight goes on.
John Beck is a freelance journalist and photographer
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
