I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, my wife usually knows it because I will stay in bed and rewatch The Lord of the Rings or war movies. This last time, I was looking for something different to watch. After burning through all of the John Wicks since I had not sat down and watched them front to back (I highly recommend it if you like unadulterated action), I stumbled upon a movie on Netflix called Mosul.
I always skipped over it because it seemed like a B-type war movie. For me, that usually means they don’t depict things accurately, and it’s overly Hollywoodized. I wasn’t even sure if it was based on anything real, which is my preference for war movies. Upon writing this review, I found out it was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who did The Kingdom with Jamie Foxx (another good flick that takes place in the Middle East). But what hooked me initially was that it was based on a real-life unit fighting the Islamic State during the Battle of Mosul, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.
Truth #1: The Story Is Based on the Nineveh SWAT Team
As a bit of background, ISIL captured Mosul in 2014, and now a coalition force comprising multiple countries, Iraqi government forces, and militias launched an offensive to recapture it in 2016. As the last haven for ISIL, it was a serious offensive that devolved into challenging urban combat across a landscape of destroyed buildings and rubble.
Amidst this backdrop, the film follows the Nineveh SWAT Team, a real unit formed in the late 2000s and trained by US Special Forces. In 2014, when ISIL took over Mosul, the Iraqi garrison panicked. The Nineveh SWAT Team held out in a hotel until forced to retreat. For the damage they inflicted, the captured members of the unit were not given a customary choice to switch sides and were executed. The survivors regrouped, wanting to avenge not only their comrades but their friends and family that were on the receiving end of ISIL reprisals, and began to support Iraqi government operations to retake the city, which is depicted in the movie.
Truth #2: Until the War in Ukraine, it was Deemed the Toughest Urban Battle Since WWII
The movie showcases the horrors of this urban battle. Amidst the rubble, the SWAT team has to deal with a multidimensional battlefield with no clear front line. Snipers can hide in a maze of debris pounded by artillery, airstrikes, car bombs, and IEDs. Reminiscent of the scene in The Pacific where the Imperial Japanese Army uses Okinawans as human shields in Episode 9, ISIL employed similar tactics, and that’s also depicted in the movie.
To add to the complexity of the battlefield, which the movies depict very well, there are also cultural tensions between Sunni and Shia militias. That divide within the faith of Islam is a critical component of the region’s history. Mosul fell so quickly because the general population, primarily Sunni, did not trust the Shia Iraqi government. Shia militia participated in the battle with the support of Iran, which was also shown in the movie, adding another layer to a film trying to depict many of these factors to bring the complexity and real-life experience of this battle to the screen.
The Lie: Kawa is Not Based on A Real Person
One of the main characters that audiences follow in the movie is a rookie policeman named Kawa. This character was created to serve as a mechanism to introduce the audience to the characters of the SWAT team. While there’s some fiction at work in the movie, you’ll quickly notice the film features actors from the Middle East. It’s also in Arabic, grounding it in the place and a sense of reality, which was a priority for the Russo brothers who produced the film.
This movie impressed me in that although, based on the cover, it felt like it would be a foreign film trying to depict a Hollywoodized war movie that we get in the West, it did a fair job depicting the brutality of war. Both sides are willing to torture prisoners and commit atrocities, which creates dissonance for the audience as they try to cling to their protagonists. With that dissonance, the audience is exposed to the reality that war is never clean-cut, and there’s often no neatly woven climax and result to swallow. Often, it’s a hard pill with a mix of emotions, as we saw after the pullout in Afghanistan and its parallel in Vietnam.
If you want to learn more about the real-life Nineveh SWAT Team, check out The New Yorker article written by war correspondent Luke Mogelson who profiled the unit. This Forbes article does a good job as well in providing a deeper review of the movie and separating fact from fiction.
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Art Credit: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
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