271: There Is Evil In The World. Stories of the Horrors of War. "Only Cry for the Living", with Hollie McKay

This is Jocko, podcast number 271 with Echo, Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

First they put us in a school in Tal Afar and held us for 20 days.

They didn't let us eat or drink. Only the children were given a little bread, but we had to go to the bathroom to share it.

If they caught us sharing, we were tortured.

The children were dying, starving.

They wouldn't drink the little amount of dirty water, so we found some toothpaste and put it in the water to pretend it was milk so they would drink it and not die from dehydration.

Dulled of emotion, Basema recalled everything, down to the most minor detail. How they were transferred to Mosul in cattle trucks and stashed in a traditional ceremony hall. How the elderly had to give their children urine to drink to keep them alive after ISIS cut their only water pipe. How everyone became so sick and malnourished that that clumps of their hair would fall to the floor.

But the worst was yet to come.

In the middle of the night, the ISIS men were coming in and yelling to know who was still a virgin. Basima whispered. And from the age of eight, they were taking girls to the market to sell for a cigarette.

However, Basema and several of her siblings fought up a plan to avoid being violated. They tried to look like ugly boys by using a piece of broken plate to shave their heads and dressed in the men's clothes they found hidden away.

We thought if they mistook us for boys, we would be taken out and killed rather than raped, she explained.

But instead, when they knew our trick, the men came in and stripped us in front of everybody. In front of everybody. Hundreds.

They touched us everywhere, sexually abused us.

My father and brother had to watch.

And that was the last I saw of them.

Basima did not shudder when she talked about the abuse.

She was telling her story, but she was also telling somebody else's story. She was telling the story of so many other women.

Perhaps that is how she was able to get through it with strength, by separating herself from the narrative.

When initially snatched, Gazal was with her six month old son, Baktiar and five year old daughter Darren.

When Gazal, while Gazal clutched her screaming son, Basima claimed to be the mother of Darren, in hopes that the ISIS operatives wouldn't sell her if it was clear she was no longer a virgin.

Gazal spoke of her ordeal in a tempered rhythm, relentlessly tugging at her dress and glaring at her raw, cracked hands.

At first, she said she refused to Go with the wali.

But he dragged her by her hair and took her to her and Baktiar to the Syrian city of Minbij, near the Turkish border.

They were yanked into a house like the headquarters, where there were already two other Yazidi slaves and a constant ebb of foreign fighters.

The wali said I must marry him.

But I refused. So he took my son and I didn't see him for two days.

After that. I begged and cried.

He started torturing me and said I had no option but to marry him.

Only it wasn't a real marriage.

There was no ceremony.

It was just rape.

I was forced to be a Muslim, to pray five times a day.

The coalition bombs soon started falling on ISIS installations, bases and homes. But they also fell on people who were already scared and suffering, who had no arms and no choice but to be there.

After Ghazal was gone, Basema said that she and scores of others, including young Darren, were wounded in an airstrike on the prison.

Shrapnel pierced her head. Basema's only treatment was her long ebony locks getting shaved off. She received no medicine.

The slaves were propelled down 22 skewed steps into an underground weapons storage filled with guns and bombs, which would become their living quarters. For more than a year.

We were tortured.

There were no toilets. We had to eat, sleep and do the necessary, all in the same place.

All kinds of insects and flies were in there.

They forced us to convert to Islam. We were made to look at beheaded bodies through the little window.

We didn't know when our time was up.

All we could think about was whether it was better to live.

Or to die.

What is war?

It is trying to remember those we treasure who are taken while at the same time trying to let them go.

What is war? It is waiting to kill or is waiting to be killed.

What is war? War is a war inside. The war which the world cannot see. But sometimes, if you get close enough, you can hear.

Is inmates being endlessly beaten, lashed, maimed with sadistic tools and kept in small cages.

What is war?

A human shell might have made it through the storm in one piece, but what is inside will forever be filled with a dull pain of waiting, waiting for evil to enter, to violate the person they once were. One more time.

What is war?

It is ugly.

It is lies. It is ugly. Lies. What is war? War is distrust, dishonesty, skepticism.

What is war? War is a vision of agony that becomes normal.

That's what war does to people. What is war?

Everything you could imagine hell to be.

Only Worse.

And those are some excerpts from a book called Only Cry for the Living.

Which, as you can see, is a harrowing book about the absolutely savage reign of terror perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And throughout the book, it asks that question over and over again. What is war?

And that is a.

Complex question, and it requires answers from many different angles.

And this book does an incredible job of giving us some of those answers. The book was written by an Australian American journalist by the name of Holly McKay, who spent time on the ground in Iraq, in Afghanistan and Syria, has been embedded with Australian and American troops, sat through military tribunals, and interviewed hundreds of soldiers, civilians and government officials before, during, and after the horrors of war.

And it is an honor tonight to have Holly here with us to share some of her experiences and some of the things that she learned along the way.

Holly.

Thank you so much for coming down to join us.

Thank you for having me.

This is definitely a very rough subject that you dove into and that you pursued. And, you know, I didn't know you or anything about you really until I started reading through the book. I just basically knew that you were a journalist. But there's some interesting. The pathway that you took to get here, as I kind of explored that is interesting. And before we jump into the book.

I just want to kind of get some of your background. You know, I was going to say in most books, and it's true, in most books, people, at least people write books and they say they're not about themselves, but they write about themselves. Right. And you actually don't spend a lot of time writing about yourself in this book. So just a little background before we jump in about, you know, so. So you were born in Australia?

Yes, so I was born in North Queensland in Australia, and my dad was in the mine. So we moved around a fair bit. And then when I was very young, I became very, very heavily involved in. In ballet. And so When I was 15, I went to a boarding school, it was kind of a fame school in Sydney where we could train full time in different sort of arts. And then we did our sort of schooling on the side as. As well with that, and we could all work professionally. And so it was. It was just a very interesting way to study and grow up. And I really thought that that was the career that I was going to go into was.

Was going to be ballet, dance.

It was going to be ballet or something, which.

That is a psycho, Totally psycho, Totally psycho thing.

Totally psycho. And I, you know, but what I always say and people Think it's just. It was the best training ground for what I ended up doing. Because you. You learn to just to push yourself beyond any kind of boundary that you ever think, and that's just normal. And when you're that young, it's normal to be 15 hours a day in these crazy shoes with bloody feet and being yelled at and being told, you can only eat this, this, and this, and you have to weigh this. And it's just. There's so much discipline involved in it. And it really was the most amazing training ground. But on top of that, what it did was it really taught me so much about the world that I wouldn't have known in my Australian bubble.

When you say what you just realized that through ballet there was all these different other countries.

Yeah.

It's like, for me, growing up a little New England kid, it's like, okay, cool. This is the world.

Yeah. And I learned about the Civil Rights movement through Alvin Ailey, who was this incredible. He's got an art center in New York City. And that's how he had this amazing piece called Revelations. And I just remember being about 16 and just watching it and just the music, and it was gospel music. And I learned about this sort of whole culture. And we did that with so many parts of it, I think the Rolling Stones, there was this amazing ballet with that a Canadian company had set to the Rolling Stones. And so I learned about hedonism and all these, you know, different things and errors that I really didn't know. And it really sparked this insatiable appetite for the world. And that was through the music and this sort of deeper layer beyond that. And I really. That was what I wanted to pursue. And that's sort of why, I guess I left. I left home very young to go and study. I broke my ankle. So that sort of set back some of the immediate professional ideals that I had. And so as soon as I'd kind of healed a bit, gone to university, an opportunity came up to go to New York to. I had. I got a scholarship. I could finish my degree there. And so I thought, you know, I'll finish a degree. Maybe I'll go back into the arts. It didn't work out that way. I ended up in a journalism career, and it was not planned at all, but.

But when you went to New York, did you go to study dance still?

No. So I was studying at a small university just off Wall street called Pace that was affiliated with my university in Sydney. And I was studying. It was media arts, but I had a specialty Kind of in writing was what I loved. And I wasn't sure what direction I was going to take that or whether I was going to go back into the ballet field. So being in New York City, I got a chance to do both. Sort of the hub of creativity, really, and kind of study and have a really great time. I turned 21 in New York.

Then.

So what did you end up getting your degree in?

Media Arts and Production specialization. You know, it's a fancy ba, but I specialized in sort of writing and human rights issues. So I always had that sort of passion of trying to understand the world in, in a little bit of a deeper lens, I guess, at that point.

So what year did you graduate from college?

2003.

And then did you go back to Australia?

So, no. So when I was in New York and I arrive and then everybody is talking about these internships and I had no idea what it was. In Australia we just work. You work, you go to school, whatever. So they're talking about internships. And I was, I want to do one of those things. What are they? This sounds fascinating. And I, I went to a bunch of websites and stumbled across a Fox website and I didn't even know what Fox News was at that time. And it was early digital era and I taught myself to web code just for fun at school. And so they said, oh, well, we're building up a digital thing. You obviously seem to like that kind of thing. Would you like to do that? So I thought, yeah, I'll give this a go. This sounds great. And so I joined the newsroom there and I really, I fell in love with storytelling in a different way. I was so used to doing it through dance, through, through physically, through my body, through other, and, and being able to kind of be there. And it was much more literal than what I'd used to. But I really, I fell in love with it and being able to write and this whole new medium was just beginning and I just, I really threw myself into it and I loved it. And then at the end of it, you know, as I said, I was 21 and they said, we'll sponsor you if you'd like to come and, and work here full time. And so that sort of made up my mind pretty quickly that that was a pretty amazing opportunity and the dance career might, might have to be for another life. So, yeah, so I was sponsored and they said, would you like to go to la? And I was, I was really in love with New York. But I said, sure, let's go to LA and let's do this. And so I went to la and I guess by default, being in Los Angeles there was, you know, the entertainment hub of.

And so that sort of seemed to be. And I had my own column, which again was sort of a bit of a baptism by fire and was just immediately thrown into this cage of, you know, I describe it when I got there, Jocko. It was the summer of 2007 and Paris Hilton had just gotten out of jail and somehow I'd made friends with an assistant of hers and she was living in this beach house down in Malibu. And so every day we'd go to these parties at Paris and it was the paparazzi's were lining up on the beach. And I just remember thinking, this is the biggest circus I've ever seen. Like, this is ridiculous.

And it stayed that way for me. And I think even though I had some really incredible opportunities and to meet really amazing people too. And I don't think I really, at the time, when you get to sit down for 20 minutes with Steven Spielberg or something, I don't think I really, you know, valued. I think it was. I just, it was too young to kind of understand. This is pretty cool. But I just got to meet so many people from different walks of life. I would be. I'd be covering a Suge Knight trial in Compton and then next minute I'd be, you know, driving to. To a choreography session with the Spice Girls reunion tour. It was just this real crazy, you know, that I'd be at, you know, Diddy's party and then I would be at, you know, some other cool place. And it. But to me, the funny thing about it was I always felt I was the outside looking in at something. I never felt part of it. I just felt like this was this. It was a launchpad, but it was this incredible stepping stone. And I guess similar to the ballet, it taught me something really crucial, which was to snuff out the bs. And that's something that's. I don't think there's a better training ground for that than. Than being in that entertainment world because you learn to see through people so quickly and you learn to really navigate. There's so many layers around these people. They have publicists, managers. There's just so many layers and a lot of intimidation. People trying to stop you from running a story, people trying to spin this, this way, that way. And it really taught me from a very young age to be very resilient against that. To be. No, that's not, that's not what I Saw. That's not what happened. That's not what the situation is. Why are you doing that? And I think, yeah, I can't imagine. And that's something that's really served me really well.

So the name of this. What was the name of your column?

Pop Tarts. That's my old boss. I don't know where that came from. He just came up with it one day and said, this is what it's going to be and let's do it.

Did you? Isn't it. As a reporter, aren't you supposed to feel like an outsider? Are you supposed to be on the outside looking in?

Yes, and technically, yes, but in the entertainment industry, and this is one thing that always bothered me about it was that people were so busy trying to be friends with these people, and I could never get my head around it. I was like, they're not my friend. I don't want to be their friend. I have my own friends. And so I think people always automatically assume that you must. Yeah, that you must, you know, want to be this friend. And everyone's kissing each other's ass on a red carpet. Don't you look great tonight. No.

So people get totally sucked into the whole thing.

Totally sucked in. Yeah. And that was what. Yeah, that was one thing that annoyed Mary. I remember being about 22 and one of those big entertainment shows. A producer had approached me and said, you know, we'd love to talk to you about a job and this and that and. And probably stupidly, because the money was probably quite good, but I said, oh, no, not interested, thank you. And that was my immediate reaction, was I would just have to sit there and basically be nice to you all the time. And that wasn't the person I was. I wanted to understand the real story behind it. And.

It'S hard to do that in Hollywood without sort of being shunned, I guess. And anyone who does kind of do that, they are shunned. They don't get the access they want to the places and things. And I think people are really drawn to that world because.

They want to feel that. That being part of something.

So at what point did you sort of envision where. What you really wanted to do?

So I. It was a slow process. I started to do a lot more sort of investigative work, and then I would sort of pick up different politics stories. I was always very vested in world affairs. And there was a great foreign correspondent in our bureau, and he'd spent a lot of time living in Pakistan and just, you know, had incredible stories and he really, and I sat with him and he really gave me that encouragement that I needed. And that was just, you just have to go and do it. You know, you love to travel. You've traveled to all these places. And I, and I traveled a lot and I'd sort of learned to speak a little bit of Arabic. It's gone now, but growing up I'd learned to speak and I just had a real appetite for understanding different parts of the world. And kind of growing up in the time when Afghanistan and Iraq and a lot of friends of mine that were my age were kind of being deployed. And so I always really wanted to understand it. And then with his name was Dominique and his support was just, you've just got to go and do it. And so I really just had to put myself out there. I had to be that annoying person to my bosses. I wanna do this, I wanna do this, I wanna do this. And luckily I had people in New York that supported me, that looked at my work and thought, well, we've thrown her on so many different stories and she's always managed to come back with something and she knows how to investigate, she knows how to work independently, so why not? So that was sort of my, my segue into it and I really reached a point where I knew I had to leave that entertainment thing.

And did you create enemies in the entertainment thing?

I wouldn't say I created enemies. I mean there were certain, you know, I definitely had a few run ins and I definitely spoke my mind probably.

More than it seems like if you.

Had the attitude like, hey, I'm gonna tell the truth and people are trying to adjust your stories and you're like not, not complying with what they want you to do. It seems like it'd be a pretty easy environment to make people mad.

Yes. Yeah, it did. It did. And then sort of, I guess toward the last year or six months I was doing it, I.

I probably looking back on it, it had checked out a little bit. But yeah, you do, you create enemies as you go. And again, I just, I think I just slowly was removing myself at that point anyway.

So what was the first, did you get like an assignment to like your first assignment that started to move you down this path of this going to war.

So I was, I was in and I'd sort of been traveling through the area and then I ended up doing some work. There was, I guess the biggest one was I was in the Middle east during, when 2014, the war broke out in Gaza. So I was sort of going back and forth between Israel and Gaza and sort of being able to cover it because I was there. That was kind of my baptism, by far.

What were you doing there?

I was there. I was vacationing, visiting friends in Jordan. I was hanging out with Bedouins in a Bedouin tent.

And you just. Notebook and a piece, A pen and a notebook. And I'm on. And then you have contacts back in your news station and you say, here's what's going on.

I just wrote this, and I wrote some stuff there. And then I sort of went back and I thought this was just. And at that time, that was also when ISIS had sort of really sparked, I guess, in. In. In the Middle East. And I'd been covering or closely sort of following the Arab Spring, which was all in those years prior to that. So I just. I was so invested in it, I guess. And I harassed and harassed and then made contacts with. With different people and fixers on the ground in Iraq. And, yeah, I went for. To cover isis, I guess, after that would have been the fall of 2014. So that was in the very beginning stages.

I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking we. Everybody kind of knew what ISIS was. It's a very courageous move to say that's what I'm gonna go do. Go find out what these folks are up to.

Yeah.

And I use the term folks very loosely with them. You know, I'm gonna. And.

As I read through the book, which I'm going to. I'm not gonna do it justice because, you know, we're only gonna read. We're obviously not gonna read the whole thing right now.

The.

The book is, you know, I got the manuscript. I don't know when. A year ago, six months ago, a year ago, something like that. Because we ended up publishing it at Jocko Publishing, which was awesome. It's when I read, like, the first seven pages and just said to myself, are you kidding me? This thing, this story needs to get out. So with that.

I always have to make that caveat that when I read this thing, it's. If it seems like it's, oh, wait, where'd that come from? Or who's that character? It's because I'm not reading the whole thing. And you have to get the book to really. To follow your story. And it is chronological. You know, it starts off in November of 2014, and it ends up close to 2019, I think. But it is chronological. But it's also. It's. It moves around from location to location, story to story, because sometimes you're in Baghdad. Sometimes you're in Raqqa, sometimes you're in. On the outskirts of Mosul. You're traveling to all these different places. But it's. It's way more evident when you read the book, the whole book, rather than me just sitting here reading chunks of it. So that's my caveat.

When you are traveling over there, just. Are. Are you just traveling? Are you traveling on an American passport?

So I became an American citizen in 2017. So initially I was just Australian. I was a green card holder, and then I got my citizenship in 2017. So.

And then when you're traveling into a country, so I was in the military. And so we would have.

An official passport, so not a diplomatic passport, which was a black passport, but not a regular American passport, which is a maroon passport. We would have blue passports which said that we're official, I guess, government Americans. Is there anything that you have that gives you some kind of indication as press?

Nope. Journalists are just regular citizens. Wait, nothing special.

You're rolling in there.

Yeah.

Who's supplying you with gear, who's giving you body armor, who's giving you helmets, stuff like that.

So very, very. I did. I did have my. We all, generally, as journalists, we all have our own. Or I arrange to. Wherever I'm going, if I.

Did you get any training?

Yeah. Yep.

What kind of training did you get?

Just sort of basic, you know, hostage training, just kind of the basic first aid. You just kind of have to do a few basic things. You go. But most of my training was really on the ground. And the approach that I decided to take really early on, which I think served me, and it's probably the approach that I will always take, is very under the radar. So I would see people that went in with especially. And it's very difficult with television because television crews have to go in with cameras, and they go in with a lot of security, and you become very visible. For me, I went in. I would organize to meet with locals, wherever it is I was going, my local fixer, a local house I'd be staying in, and I would just very much go under the radar. And to me, that was always the way that I felt that I could get the story. And even though people thought, oh, you have to have security, you have to have this, you have to have that, I never felt I needed that. I felt that that would have made me more of a known presence, which would have been, you know, more dangerous for me as a writer. I felt that I didn't a lot of those things and that was always, you know, and I discussed those things with my. With my superiors and ahead of time, and that was always something that they took, you know, enabled me to make those decisions and be that independent.

And how good was your Arabic?

It was okay for a while.

Where did you learn Arabic?

You know, I grew up, so where I was going to school was a sort of. There was a big Lebanese community there. So I would just. I was so interested. I just would have people teach me and so. But I always worked with the translator because I couldn't pick up the dialects. I mean, the dialects were just so confusing, and I didn't want to risk ever, I guess, getting something that would have been crucial and getting it wrong.

Yeah, I know the. The locals ability to. To understand and give you these nuanced things. You know, the interpreters that we had would, you know, because we'd have. We'd have Americans, like seals, that had been trained to speak Arabic. And God bless them, they do their best, but, like, you just. They'd be standing side by side with a native speaker and, you know, my SEAL interpreter would say, hey, the local guy said this. And then the native speaker would say, hey, here's what he actually means. And there's just a little bit that you're just not gonna catch. You know, it's just not gonna happen. So you definitely.

It's like trying to. Trying to tell the difference between, you know, someone that's from New York and someone that's from New Jersey.

Right?

There's people that can go, oh, yeah, guy's from Jersey. That guy's from New York, you know, and the same thing overseas.

And you are correct. Here's. Here's the weird thing about what you said about security is.

A low profile. 99% of the time is going to be better, and no one's going to notice you. No one's going to care. What people freak out about is there's that 1% of the time. And then what do you do? And then you weigh those out. Because if it's only. If there's only a tiny chance of something happening, and then you're in a really bad situation because you don't have any security, that's horrible. But when you have security, you increase the chances so much that it's a gamble. This is always a gamble.

And I always felt very comfortable in the fixers and the people that I used locally that, that they had sort of the. Know how to at least, you know, with exit plans and other things like that. And I always had contacts in the U.S. in the region and other places that if I was desperate, that I could, I could turn to if I, if I needed to.

How did you go about finding your fixers?

It general. I mean, it depended sort of assignment by assignment, but I usually went through either other journalists who gave referrals for people that they'd worked with or people they knew that were living there with other businesses that had used different interpreters. It really, really depended on, on that. But usually it's always word of mouth. I would never just pluck somebody off Facebook and, and expect them to, to be a fixer. It always be several layers of people who could sort of vet and work for them and then do a little bit of my own background digging on them and just try to make sure. And you can never get it right there. I mean, there's plenty of situations and unfortunately where journalists have been sold out and other things. And we saw that a lot in Syria with isis. But in, in my case, I always worked with some really just incredible people.

I've got all kinds of scenarios running through my head right now.

Can't imagine.

I, I, When I look back at my life, my whole life is my entire life from the time I was born until like two days ago. I always think about all the things that I've done where I look back and say, man, that wasn't too smart.

Oh, God, do you do that much? Yes. I was, I was thinking about this the day I thought the things that I did, not just in Iraq, but, you know, other places in Yemen and Afghanistan and in my 20s, and I just would never do them now. I would never do them now. I look back and I think, what, what were you thinking? Or I guess when almost in the beginning.

And this is where experience comes into it. You almost. Maybe it's night. It's naivete. You don't always know what you're getting yourself into and you get out of it and you're fine. And then I look back on it now and I think, that was so stupid. What were you thinking? Like, that was not worth the story. I mean, did you even get a story out of that?

Like, yeah, yeah, as I read your book, I mean, that's what I was thinking. You know, there's a lot of. You got lucky a lot, which is awesome. You know, you had a massive amount of courage goes into these, which is awesome. And I wanted to ask you that, like, do you feel looking back, like now, like you were a little naive at the time and obviously.

Sometimes a little Bit of naivety and arrogance is really nice when you look back at it. If it went well, which it certainly did for you, awesome. All right, I'm gonna jump into this book.

The first boy to introduce himself was a nine year old named Abdullah. He struck me with his light eyes, gap tooth smile and spattering of freckles across his nose. There was a gentleness to it, to his demeanor. I wondered how such gentleness could come from a child that had been ripped from his home by war. Abdullah told us that he was a Muslim from Sinjar, or Sinjal, as they say in Kurdish. He had been forced to flee two months earlier when ISIS invaded his village. He insisted on showing us around the camp. Annotated, Annotating. Like a proud tour guide, he explained the different people who lived there and where they were all from. He explained how they had been confronted with the same vicious enemy and how they coped in different ways. Some ISIS we knew, Abdullah said, some of our neighbors became ISIS too. I did not know then that such a phrase would be repeated time and time again as the years went on. I did not realize then the importance of that phrase.

The clefts and all the conspiracies that would come from it. That one phrase would come to represent the fissures of a country that I wasn't sure could ever be put back together. Our neighbors became ISIS, too. And, you know, there's something that I failed to do as I put these notes together, is.

You, throughout the book, you pick these characters and you revisit them. And I get some of them, but I don't get all of them. I'm not sure if I get back to Abdullah, but that's what you do. So as people hear me sort of talk about these different characters, look, the book is 450 pages long. And so if people are wondering, like, oh, I wonder what happened to that kid or what happened to that character. Many of the characters that you become close with, you revisit over the years. And as I said, the length of the book is five years or four, four and a half years, something like that. There's a lot. I mean, think of a kid that's, you know, 10 years old becomes 14. That's a big difference. And, and obviously there also are characters that you never see again, and God knows what happens to them.

Fast forward a little bit here. The soldiers at the Mosul dam greeted us warmly. The Peshmerga began. And I'm giving everyone a background in Peshmerga, what you do and look, you give all kinds of nice little history lessons in here too. The Peshmerga began as something of a mountain militia in the 1920s when the push for Kurdish independence began. In recent decades, they had faced unrelenting persecution from the Ba'ath loyalists of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One Peshmerga fighter told me, they don't suffer from psychological issues pertaining to combat because they have grown up around fighting and have developed an early understanding that it is just what we have to do to them. PTSD was something of a first world phenomenon. We worked with Kurdish soldiers sometimes in the Iraqi army, and they were just really good. And they just were really good. They have that. That's why that. That. That's what they do. They grow up fighting. That's sort of their thing. It's like when you're in the US Military and you meet someone that's from.

You know, Wyoming, and they grew up hunting and living out in the land, and they're gonna be good soldiers. That's just how it is. Somebody from Alabama that grew up in the woods, they're gonna be a good soldier. That's just how it is. That's how you feel about the Kurt. That's how I always felt about the Kurt.

And just because they say they don't suffer from any psychological problems doesn't mean that they don't, and that's. It's just a very different relationship that they have with it. And not just the Peshmega, but in a lot of the, you know, in the Middle east, in those. In the armies and things. It's just not something that they. They acknowledge or really talk about.

Yeah. And in many ways, it's something that we haven't talked about up until these most recent wars.

Yep.

Even though it's always been there.

You continue on here. The Peshmerga soldiers range from around 18 to more than 70 years old, with many coming out of retirement in the quest to defeat ISIS threat. During days of intense conflict, the Peshmerga are lucky to return to their base for two or three hours of sleep and a quick bite to eat before venturing back to their fighting locusts. As it stood, a prominent portion of the fighters are not soldiers, but what they call security advisors who don't take a salary and volunteered simply out of devotion.

There are special forces that have been arranged for these people. They don't register their names and don't sign contracts. They just want to serve in Kurdistan.

One Peshmerga soldier explained how ISIS commanders often drug young fighters with special tablets that Leave them disoriented and shooting wildly into the night. Sometimes they were able to keep going despite being shot several times, taking upwards of 20 bullets before they went down. For those who survive, and that's in reference to the ISIS fighters, when they realize what they've done, they sometimes regret it.

And you say here almost every Kurd wants to share their history, history of their people and their oppression. But the string that could be weaved through and through was that they did not expect to be granted freedom for nothing. They knew they would have to fight for every fight for it, every step of the way. The secession of letdowns, of losses and gains was all part of their rough climb up the rope of revolution. At the top, they would find their independence. When they referred to their soldiers killed on the battlefield, they sometimes said that they were martyred and sometimes said that they were murdered. I wondered how differently Americans would see wars if the press and the people spoke of our troops in the firing line as having died in a homicide rather than killed in action. And now you kind of reflect on this battle that had taken place. The rain fell harder. The bullets flew wildly into the growing darkness that hid the dead is bodies nearby. Hungry, untamed dogs had gouged into the skeletons almost immediately. Some had been dead for days, some had names and others had been left nameless. Some maculated by the creatures howling at the moon.

Had no faces.

So you jump right into this stuff with, I mean, this battle that's taking place up at the Mosul Dam. You're seeing the ISIS fighters.

This is a long way from Paris Hilton's Malibu beach parties, I guess, Definitely.

And when I first went, you know, I didn't go with the intention of going to the front lines. I really went with the intention of trying to understand, I guess, the human cost war. And I really just wanted to go and talk to people that lived there. I wanted to understand what it was like to be a displaced person, what it was like to sort of have everything and then have nothing. And I just happened to sort of make a good connection through somebody. And then when I went to meet him, it was a crazy story. He came, he picked us up, the car got stuck in the mud and. And there was sort of a lot of fighting going on. And so we sort of had to go in a different direction. And then we ended up sort of on the front line. So it wasn't something I'd even really planned. And I'm sure my bosses would have had a heart attack if I'd sort of told them in advance. But yeah, it was, it was a, it was a night very eye opening. And.

Even when I, I guess the times that I've spent with the Peshmega, with other soldiers, Iraqi soldiers on the front line, it's always still been that same theme for me of wanting to get that human cost. So I'm much more interested in, in those stories, I guess, from my perspective, than, than what we call the, the bang bang is what journalists usually call the, the sort of, the more military aspect of it. I wanted to understand who, who they were, who their families were, what their motivation for being there was. As you said, it's, you know, these people are coming out and, and volunteering and, and they're not getting paid and they're bringing their AK47 from home and they don't really have much more beyond that. And I just, that to me was fascinating. What is it? What is motivating you? What is driving you? What, what are you sacrificing to do this? And do you plan to just keep doing this over and over again? And I think for me, that was always the question that I was trying to.

Trying to understand or trying to piece together in my head.

Yeah. And as I'm sitting here thinking about you on the front lines for the first time, sort of, and then going back to the, the conversation we had about being naive, and I just remembered a conversation. First of all, I've had this conversation with a bunch of veterans, but the one that came to my mind was a guy by the name of Dean Ladd, who is a Marine in World War II, who went on the island campaign, and he was going into Tarawa as a Marine, as a Marine platoon commander or company commander, I forget which, but I, there was, this was an insane operation. They could tell it was going to be insane. You know, they're going to storm the beaches where the Japanese had been dug in for three years. And he did this over and over again. But I, you know, I said, well, did you think anything might happen to you? He said, it's always going to happen to the other guy, which is what everybody thinks. Which is what everybody thinks. And, you know, that's what. That's what I think. You know, that's probably going to happen to somebody else, but not me.

Yeah. And I think just, I guess by nature, you know, with a lot of journalists, whether they've had, you know, tremendous years behind them doing this or not, it's, I guess it's that same notion of, you know, we're not working for the government. We're not working for anyone in particular, you know, beyond our organizations. And so you sort of have this kind of strange freedom. No one is telling you what to do, you know. And.

For me, I guess I really wanted to take advantage of that and just. Yeah. I remember one time being at. Did you ever go to Taji Air Base just outside of Baghdad?

I think I flew through there, but I never spent any time.

I spent a bit of time there, and I was with the Aussies, and then we were supposed to go to El Assad and on the. To the Marine base there. And there was just dust storm after dust storms. Every flight was getting canceled. I was like, I just want to go back to Baghdad. I was trying to get a interview with Sar, and I was just, let's just go to Baghdad. And I couldn't. Couldn't get back to Baghdad. And so I was literally just calling a cab from Taji to, like, come and get me so I could drive back to my hotel and meet my fixer in Baghdad. I remember the Aussies standing there going, you're just crazy. And then. But we're really jealous. I was like, yeah, I can do that. Yeah.

And what's interesting, going back to the earlier conversation, if you were to take a convoy back from there to Baghdad, you would probably be at greater risk, much greater risk than if you were in a cab, an orange and white opal freaking taxi cab that are driving all over the place.

Yeah, yeah. And I would do that through work. I remember going through, like, all these Iranian militia checkpoints, and I was. Would be in these Yazidi cars with a baby on my lap pretending I was a Yazidi. You know, I put the scarf over my head, there was a baby in my lap. I think I managed to get through about 100 of these Iranian Shia checkpoints, and not one of them questioned me. And I remember just getting out of that, being like, oh, had I. And I know of other journalists. I knew a couple of people, and they. They got busted at checkpoints and turned around or turned in or whatever it was. And for me, that was going under the radar. I got to where I needed to be. Had I even got the. The checkpoint permission slips that you're supposed to get, I would. I wouldn't have gotten through. So sometimes you just got to not play by the rules.

Under the radar. That's the theme.

I got one more. Maybe it's not the last one, but earlier in the book, there are some history lessons. Like I said, even though most of the book is more just interviews with people and and what you're actually seeing. This is a little history lesson. On March 17, 1988, the morning after Saddam Hussein's bath party unleashed a tirade of chemical weapons and killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in the city of Halab Hallabja.

Halabjah.

Yeah, Halabjah. A few brave photojournalists ventured into the city to ensure the brutal dictators atrocities would be documented and exposed to the world. And you're now interacting with one of them. Akram looked at me shyly, extending his hand. Nearly 27 years later, he was working at the memorial site known as the Halabjah Monument and Peace museum, constructed in 2003 on the anniversary of the attack in 2006, residents thousands of residents rioted at the site protesting what they thought was to be capitalizing on the tragedy and misusing aid funds, destroying many of the archives. The monument was rebuilt into a hub of reflection and solace, poised against the serene Iranian mountainside with several abandoned bath party tank sitting idly to one side. Inside, the iconic photographs taken in the pallid aftermath of the attacks had been recreated as life sized images and statues. A mother clutching her dead baby, lifeless children strewn across pavements.

And here's Akram talking. We need to remind the new generation about what happened to this town and we need to keep reminding them so that it doesn't happen again.

Sometimes I can't stop crying. Every day I look at the pictures and I am reminded that it is my family in those pictures. End quote. There's There was such a depth of sadness in the way he shared his story, constantly relieving a cursed reliving a cursed history. Sodom had ordered the chemical attack amid the Iran Iraq war following intel reports that Iranian soldiers had been implanted inside the Kurdish city. Akram still didn't seem quite sure how or why his life was spared, or why he was the only survivor within the proximate area. He recalled having instinctively placed his mother's scarf around his mouth for protection the moment something felt wrong. He recalled throwing up blood into the scarf, which still smelled of his mother even though she was dead beside him.

He recalled the way the vision blur his vision blurred, slowly fading into blackness. He remembered cars rolling over bodies as other victims in their last few minutes on earth vomited chunks of green.

Some were visibly burning, their skin boiling with bubbles.

Others laughed uncontrollably, an eerie side effect of the lethal chemical cocktail of vx. Vx, sarin, Taboon and mustard gas.

That's a Chilling vision.

What kind of health was this guy in? Now? Was he scarred?

Yeah, he definitely.

I mean, he was rel. Looked normal, but there was something about him. I can't put my finger on it, but there was definitely something that that was. Wasn't quite right.

Fast forward a little bit. There's a section called the Faces of Evil. Evil. This is November 2014. Some ISIS soldiers will tell you that the reason they joined were simple, straightforward, woven into the web of basic survival. Money, protection, food. Other times, the reasons to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group were complex, deep seated in sectarian, tribal and historical grievances dating back centuries.

So what is war? War is a composite of individual stories and reasons, one rarely the same as the other. And you know, I pointed out in the introduction that you asked this question over and over again, most, more times than I read. Maybe that's the first time you asked, asked the question. But.

That'S what's interesting about that answer. It's a composite of individual stories and reasons. And that's what this book is, is like you're compiling all these different.

Perspectives that people have, what they've been through and how they ended up here. Did you have that intent? When did this work that you were doing start to formulate in your head as a congruent story that you could put together in a book?

It was something, I guess it's funny, most of this book was written handwritten in notebooks, so you can imagine how many of those are sitting in storage right now. But yeah, I think from sort of the first in 2014, I was trying to craft together how I wanted to weave these stories and how to make it a bigger story. And I just, I knew that I didn't want to write something that was political or policy driven or I just, I didn't feel that that was my job as a journalist. I wasn't here to change laws. I wasn't here to, to become or to be a quote unquote expert in anything. My job was to tell a story. That was what I knew and that's what I knew that I could do. And so for me, it was, it was early on that I started to shape that idea and I didn't quite know how to put it together. And then I guess around 20, end of 2015, I thought, you know, this approach I want to take with it, I really have to be patient because you're going to have to stick this out for a few more years. This isn't something that you can work on and finish in the next Couple of months. So I had to give myself a good lesson. Lesson in patience and. And just continue to. To spend the next few years just going back and forth and. And spending as much time as I possibly could on the ground. And then I guess I felt that I hadn't. And I could have kept going. That was the thing. I just. I could have kept going. I could be there now and keep going and still have these incre. Stories. But at some point I had to realize, okay, you need to stop. And, you know, there are other. Other things you need to do. There are other places you need to focus, but there also has to be a beginning and an end to this. So, yeah, I guess it was sort of 2019 that I decided that I think I had enough to put something together. But. But have you ever read Hiroshima?

No.

Oh, it's one of the most incredible, incredible books about.

Japan. And it was a journalist who'd gone back and he was telling stories, these individual stories, decades after it. And it had such a lasting effect on me growing up. And that was sort of, I guess, one of the biggest motivations in the style that I took with it was again, that human cost and then just telling the very narrative story from as many perspectives as possible and. And as much detail as I possibly could as well. And I think that was something I wanted to bring out was it's those small details that make up the big ones, and I think it's the individual stories that tell a big picture. And sometimes we can look at statistics and we can look at these things that really distance us from a conflict, because it's really easy to do that. You can say, okay, well, 202 people died in that suicide attack.

But you tell the story of one person who died in that suicide attack, and it's probably going to have a much more profound impact on you. And that's what I wanted to drive home, was how the individual stories make up the big story. It's the micro in the macro.

Yeah. And that's very reflective of the way. Well, with this podcast, of course, do we cover some big, you know, general patents books? Yes, we do. But the majority of the books that we cover on here are written by a lance corporal or a corporal or a private that's out there in the front lines carrying a machine gun. Because once again, when you. When you're talking about what the general saw or what the general did, there's a. There's an altitude there. There's a lack of connection in many cases as to what actually is happening. On the ground and, and what that looks like down there. So, yeah, your, your effort to do that absolutely came through. And that example of the suicide bombing. Yeah, See a statistic of 202 people were killed in the suicide bombing. You can read that and you can move on. You can, you can read, see that headline and read, you know what city it was in and cool, you got the information. You can move on. When you read about one of those victims, their family, how it's going to impact them, what mark it's going to leave, how they ended up there in the first place, what their goals and dreams were like, that's, that's the impact.

And by the way, it's not always good, as is the case here with Omar. Back to the book. Omar, a 25 year old ISIS fighter from the Iraqi village of Door Saladin, admitted that during ISIS's first month in Mosul, he had killed scores of his countrymen and foreign contractors on their behalf.

Quote, they came to our area and forced me to protect their lands. Omar said flatly of his ISIS commanders, his thick mono brow remaining frighteningly still, a physical manifestation of the emotionless figure before me. After a while they told me, when are you going to start protecting your own land?

His eyes burning into mine, he went on to describe the words of his superiors. They told me to do it or die. And then they killed people in front of me. By his count, he had racked up 70 executions in a matter of months. He mandated that he killed his victims with rifle shots and was chillingly candid about why he did it.

Yeah, it's, it's fascinating that you're sitting face to face with these, these individuals and obviously you have a knack for getting people to talk because throughout the book you're getting people to explain things to them, to you that are either A, incredibly painful or B, incriminating like that somehow you're getting these people to talk. It's very impressive.

You'd be surprised how many people want a platform, you know, get them to talk and they, they want to. And often I think a lot of it came down to they just hadn't talked to anyone for a while, so they were ready to talk to someone and they wanted to tell their story. And you get them going for a minute and they're spilling their life to you because they've been, you know, locked up or whatever the situation is, and people like to listen to themselves speak. And that's what I've certainly found in interviewing a number of different jihadists. And they want to Talk.

You say? Here. The facilities director of security noted that most ISIS fighters were uneducated and easily led down the grisly path of violent jihad. Some regret their actions, some do not. The guard said to me earlier, nonchalantly understand that most are young and have no information. They are impressionable. They listen to the second life paradise story. 72 virgins, rivers of wine and staying young forever. That is all they know.

And you look, there's, there's so many interviews in here with all these different people. You've got a get the book to read through them. They're powerful. I guess I got drawn into this section. A Star Spangled Love. The notion of giving thanks to the red, white and blue was not lost on the people of Kurdistan. The bald eagle, Old Glory and the almighty American dollar were king. In the Kurdish part of Iraq. Most ethnic Kurds did not hide their affection for the U.S. a concept that had become rare in the predominantly anti American throw throngs of the Middle East. Shops peddled American flags, US military gear was prized and the locals spoke glowingly of the notion of the nation they created with removing Saddam Hussein, the dictator whose heavy hand had so often come down on the minority group clustered into the northern region.

Imagine if America didn't exist, said accountant Kurdo Amin Aga, whose home was outfitted with Israeli, American and Kurdistan flags and who wears a U.S. army shirt and a Navy SEAL watch. Without America, the world would be run by China or Iran. With dewy eyes, he turned to me in earnest. America represents freedom, he stressed. Our dream is to be eternally allied to America.

You don't hear a lot about that.

Yeah, that was, it was fascinating. Yeah, when you go, it was this little pocket of, I mean the Kurds in the north, they just.

They loved, they loved both bushes. They, you know, it was just something that they just, they thought America was the ones to save the day.

Yeah, I mean you go in and talk about how you're walking through the, like the bazaar has red, white and blue has flags. All this stuff in there, just pro America, pro freedom. And this is also interesting. Kurds, who as a group are overwhelmingly Muslim, also portrayed themselves as more religiously tolerant. Right now I'm working with Muslims, Yazidi, Christians, we're all working together, said one high ranking KRG official. They celebrate occasions together. It's something very beautiful. I have friends who pray and friends who don't. That's not my problem. That is their choice. That is how the Kurdish people think about religion. On one early December morning, I saw Several Kurds busily setting up and decorating Christmas trees. Whether it was done in a secular embrace of a foreign religious rite or simply to make guests more comfortable was not clear. We're still new to this, a Kurdish hotel employee said with a smile, bickering with a co worker on how to decorate the tree. But we love it.

Very tolerant.

Yeah.

Setting up Christmas trees.

Yeah. During the. After the 2003 Iraq invasion, they marketed. They had an entire tourism marketing campaign called the Other Iraq. And that was sort of how they would try to draw people in to come and visit them was this Other Iraq they called themselves. So even though they belonged to Iraq, they tried to be the Other. So that was their kind of approach.

Beautiful.

Fast forward a little bit. That summer, I drifted between displacement camps, the big ones and the small ones, the ones that were new, only just established to accommodate the constant swell of newcomers, the ones that had been here for years as past wars melted into new wars. Over time, the camps had burdened into little towns of their own, complete with banks and bridal stores and markets and places to buy home goods and sweaters.

What is war? War brings resiliency. It is turning what feels like a prison into something of a home. What is war? War is running. It is not knowing what is on the other side. It is being unwelcome in your own home. Is being unwelcome away from your home. Sometimes war is walking to one moment here and the next in some no man's land that you could. That could never be home. It was drifting from place to place, both in mind and body.

Crazy to think these camps are set up for so long that they become little villages.

Yeah. And what's really sad is that so many of them still exist. And because I guess it's really out of sort of the main headlines of the news now. They just. The resources are just. There's nothing. The likes of Bessemer and Gazelle, they're still in camps, just with nothing and no resources. So it's almost even a worse situation for. For so many of the displaced now than it was for them four years ago.

You say here in a small camp designated especially for displaced Christians, a group of men looked me in the eyes and said sternly that they do not both trying to read or watch the news anymore because it was all fraudulent, all lies.

As you're hearing that, does that make you think, okay, I've got to tell the truth? I mean, I just can't. I can only imagine hearing that from your perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. For them I think they just grown so frustrated. I think when you see such atrocities happen in the beginning, you really believe that there's no way the world's just going to sit there and do nothing. I mean, this is crazy. Somebody's gonna do something. Someone's gonna stop this. And then you reach a point a year in, maybe it's 18 months in, when you realize it's. It's not. Well, it's not that simple, but it's just not. The situation's not changing. And so for them, I think that was just the acceptance that the news was never gonna help them. Nobody was ever gonna help them. And so they. They'd come to that sort of group rationale of they mustn't be telling the truth, because if they were telling the truth, then this wouldn't be happening. If the world knew what was really happening, it would have been stopped by now. So therefore, it must be all lies.

How much do you think these stories get lost because of the short attention span of the world?

I think very lost.

I think very lost. Which is why, I guess I wanted to try to put it at least together as one cohesive unit.

The attention span is short, but I think it's always been. Telling foreign stories has always been difficult. I talked to journalists covering wars in the 90s with Bosnia and other places, and they said the same thing. Princess Diana did something, and it would take the headlines. And then for me, it was sort of something would happen. Kim Kardashian breaking the Internet, and that would take the headline. And so I think it's always a thing where no matter what era that you're in, that foreign news, unfortunately, isn't going to always be at the top. But that doesn't mean we don't report on it. That doesn't mean we don't give it resources. That doesn't mean we don't tell a story. And for me, that was what I was drawn to, was the stories that I felt needed to be told.

Whether they have an impact or not. That. That is out of my hands. But those voices deserve to be heard.

This is a good segue into this section, which is entitled Don't Forget Us.

Early one morning, I ventured further north to visit a Yazidi camp stuffed into the wedge where Syria, Iraq, and Turkey converge. As it came into view over hilltops awash with a mist of air, I ascertained a sense of something profoundly exhausting. What struck me most was that unlike other camps where people animatedly voiced their anger and wailed about the lack of Water, sharing conspiracy theories about who was really behind ISIS and detailing what had happened to them in the flashes after they realized they could no longer stay. The Yazidis were so grieved that they said very little.

They did not complain. They just looked at me with wide eyes that could brand even the most stoic of souls. They all spoke softly, repeating that all they wanted was for their family members to return and for the chance to go home. Every single person had either lost a family member to death or disappearance or had been maimed when ISIS assaulted their village less than a year earlier. It did not make sense for them to complain. To complain would be a waste of their precious energy.

I was escorted into a tent where a thin woman had burrowed herself into the corner, weeping silently into her black scarf, shoulders trembling. She was a survivor of sex slavery. She was alive, but she was hardly living. More girls and women tiptoed into the tent behind me. Nobody wanted to speak of this ordeal. The notion of being touched.

The term sex slave is a controversial one. Many decry that it should not be used, that it was not politically correct nor accurate, an argument which I hear and understand. But I have chosen to use it because it is a term that many of the survivors and families use and because it's blunt and embedded in the reality that is not the reality that we want. Speaking of rape was taboo and terrifying within the closed and staunchly conservative Yazidi community, although the silence was slowly shifting. But there, inside that suffocating space, the women held each other up, their embraces reassuring each other that they were now safe, if only for that moment in time. And at that moment in time, I understood that the most valuable thing I Owned was my 99 cent notebook with which I could try to capture the plight of these survivors in hopes that somehow they would not tumble from the world's oblivion. It was with my notebook that I could recall and write things. These women taught me what it meant to be extraordinary, what it meant to be brave, what it meant to lose everything.

And still find the internal spark to go on.

We'll get into more of the the Yazidi treatment. I mean, it's just a genocide, slash.

I mean, ISIS viewed them as Satan worshipers.

Yeah. Devil worshipers. Yeah.

Other end of the spectrum.

This section stood out to me.

One evening I met emerging pop star Heli Love for tea and hookah in the lounge. Hookah in the lounge of an UPS of the upscale Rotana Hotel in Erbil. She was dolled up to the nines with long perfect bleached hair extensions, fake eyelashes, red lips and strappy stilettos that clashed with her camouflage military pants in and loose fitting white top. By recording techno driven energy, boosting tunes to increase morale and filming music videos in the direct line of fire, Heli was doing what she considered to be her part in the fight. Standing vehemently with the soldiers and their will to win. Much had been said and speculated about Heli's personal life and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. But what I found was a true girl's girl. Underneath the hairspray and larger than life Persona, Helly was a self assured young woman who sought only to use her stardom and musical talents for something more than milking the Hollywood machine.

Some say I used to be, I used the peshmerga to further my own fame. But people will always complain, she said bluntly in her sharply accented English, flicking a perfectly manicured hand. My country is bleeding and my weapon is my voice and my music. And for those who have had their voices shot, I felt this was my only way of bringing their story, the story of the Kurdish people to the world.

Heli love.

I loved Heli. She was lovely.

She was, she was born in Iran, became a refugee, ended up in Finland. From there, got put into a music school of some kind.

And, and then the lore of Hollywood got a hold of her. She says this very quickly. I saw the. So she ends up in Hollywood.

Yeah, she goes, she's living in Hollywood. Yeah, doing, doing the. I think she got signed to one of the big labels, I think Dream or one of those big, you know, producers had signed her. And then, you know, what happens is you often kind of get sort of shelved away. And then, yeah, she really realizes, so the labels will sign you and offer you a deal. And then they actually just don't, you know, you never get kind of to actually release. And so once the contract is up, you can kind of move on. So I think, I'm not sure of all her details, but I think she was sort of brought over here and it was sort of starry eyed and then nothing kind of moved and she, she really saw the underbelly of what Hollywood was.

Yeah, she said, I met some producers and realized that what they were offering in exchange to promote me was a lie. It was all about sex. It was shocking to me. I gave up on almost everything. She ends up.

Cutting a couple songs over there.

She says straight away, I received death threats from radical Islamic groups and the mullahs at the mosque were insisting I was a bad influence and should be stoned to death.

My life changed. I was the lion girl. I had all these fans and all the success, but I had to contend with this too. You can watch her videos on YouTube and I definitely recommend checking them out.

Something else, right?

Yeah. Even Echo Charles would be proud because she has a lot of explosions and she's filming them.

Yeah, literally, I remember she was filming and getting, you know, controversial. Some people are, some people won't. But yeah, Isis is five miles or something down the road and she's filming a music video.

Yeah. How'd she. And you. This is one of the things I don't really trace. But you trace the rest of her story. You go back and visit her at some point, don't you?

Yeah, so I went back and. Because, yeah, I always wondered and I really, I really loved telly when I met her. And so I went back when I was in Abeel and her name came up with a friend of mine there and she'd opened a beauty school or a sort of big beauty salon and everything was very pink and you know, all the young girls would go there for their, you know, their equivalent of the prom and get ready and I think she'd really settled into that kind of life of being able to be with her people and to do things in a really different way than she'd envisioned. So, yeah, that was her way of, I guess giving back in a new evolution was to sort of be the, the.

Motivator for a lot of the, the young girls in sort of the next generation.

Yeah, I thought that was, that was awesome. It's like she, she, like you always hear people going back to your roots, you know, go back to your. She straight up went back to her roots and she lives there now and it's pretty awesome.

Yep.

Then she does have some pumped up videos.

And she's gorgeous.

I'm. Fast forward up to 2016. This brazen attack struck deep when no one was ready for it. There had been no intelligence warnings. An ISIS suicide bomber detonated at a checkpoint outside a small town called DBES near Kirkuk on November 3, 2015, allowing three fellow fighters to sneak through and temporarily commandeer a local government office. The men were sentenced to hell and all died in the attack. But the ISIS bomb expert whose handiwork sent them to their maker did not. Jassim Mohammed Attia was being held in a high security prison near the oil rich city in late January of 2016. The guards let Jassim blindfolded into the room to meet me.

What I did were terror acts, Jassim, the 22 year old, said matter of factly, sitting handcuffed in the small office in the Erbil headquarters of the OF Asia. It was my duty. There are infidel infidels and there is instruction in the Quran to stop this and to fight all infidels.

The Kurdish security forces had nabbed Jassim weeks after the attack that slaughtered 14 Kurds and left scores more wounded. Three ISIS fighters had used the checkpoint bombing as a diversion to enter the city, then briefly hauled themselves up in the mayor's office. The standoff ended when they opted to blow their own bodies to bits as police forces closed in. While that attack served as notice that ISIS was able to strike outside the terror territory it controlled, the one thwarted by Jazeem's capture would have been devastating by comparison. The Kurdish security officials told me that Jassim had been preparing to rig a powerful truck bomb bound for Erbil when he was arrested by intelligence agents. Jassim had cried like a big baby when he was seized, one intelligence officer recalled smugly, and had cried that Allah would be mad at him. The authorities relished any opportunity to take away the perceived power of ISIS members, to bellow that these fighters were nothing more than pathetic, delusional con artists.

The exact number of deaths caused by the exact number of deaths Jazeem caused, whether directly or indirectly, remained unclear. He repeatedly gloated about conducting operations that killed and harmed scores of people, including the fighters he outfitted with suicide vests or put behind the wheels of vehicles rigged to explode. He was proud of his monstrous work and craftsmanship, but he was by no means ready to be a martyr himself. When I asked if he would have strapped a vest on of his own, I never thought of killing myself. I'm not convinced to kill myself, he said unapologetically. Actually, I would leave or escape if they gave me this order. I wouldn't explode myself. That is another level of faith.

He was unconvinced by the mullah's routine. Espousing the paradise replete with 72 virgins that don't menstruate or defecate. It's our leaders that make decisions, Jazeem said.

Our scientists. Our scientists say that there are infidel people in Kirkuk is not my decision. We are students and we listen to our teachers. If somebody pledges allegiance to isis, they must take orders and do whatever orders they get. They have to do it.

I asked about the scientists and their theoretical determinations of infidel blood but he didn't seem to know. Jazeem had been taught not to question the scientists, if the scientists were really scientists. But at the top of isis, of the ISIS hierarchy, was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who Jazeem described as a good leader, who lived as a simple soldier and who was just like everyone else. He had never met or seen the elusive, self professed ISIS Khalif.

It's dangerous to meet him. No one can see him, Jazeem said, his eyes widening in surprise that even suggested such a question. It is prohibited for anybody to see him. Alternating between bravado and circumspection brought on by either remorse or the presence of a watchful jailer, Jazeem chorused that he would have to be convinced not to go back to ISIS if he were released. Before I went to prison, I had no problems killing people. Now I have a bit of regret that maybe some people don't deserve to be killed.

How long would you sit in a room with these guys for?

It really depends. And I think with him it was around about an hour to two hours.

So how would you select who you. Would you just say, hey, who do you got?

Yeah, I would usually talk to the guards about who was there, who was willing to talk. I always wanted to make it very clear to them, you know, I was a journalist and their stories were going to be, you know, as, as they told them and they needed to be. It was difficult because in some cases they hadn't been brought to trial. So, you know, when they're saying these things, you know, and you haven't been brought to trial yet, you are incriminating yourself to a degree. And so I always wanted to be very fair and very clear that I'm a journalist and what you say is going to be printed. So their willingness was obviously a big factor in them coming forward and telling their stories.

Yeah. He also said it's better if they join. We want to go to America. We want to spread our ideology all over the world.

You talk to another guy, Fahir Sahib Jamel.

By his count, he had killed dozens of uninvolved men, women and children.

He says at the beginning ISIS told us we would all go to heaven. But now that I'm in prison, it means I am going to the fire, I am going to hell.

The indoctrination was self fulfilling. Fantasy script was evident. But any sign of real remorse was not.

Real quick. When you interview these people, you mentioned that that one guy was blindfolded. Is he blindfolded during the interview?

As well, or they, they take it off. Yeah, they blindfold them when they bring them in. So they don't really know, I guess, exactly where they, you know, specific office or whatever they are. I'm not. Yeah, but they, they take it off normally. I mean he was, he still had shackles and on. But they, they took the blindfold off.

Isn't that weird just looking at him in his eyes when he's telling you all this stuff?

At first it is. There's a little bit of a warm up process and, and I found in a couple of the situations where my fixes would get very angry and I would have to ask them to leave or, you know, why would they get angry? Because often, you know, it's, it's their relatives, it's their, you know, people that have been killed by these people and they, their hate is so strong that sometimes I felt that I'm not going to get a great interview right now because, you know, you can feel that animosity. And the reason I'm, I'm trying to get them to open up here. So, you know, there was that barrier I had to deal with a little bit in the beginning. And then I think as you sort of move into it, you kind of get a, you build that rapport to a degree. They realize you're just there to, to talk to them, to have a conversation. It's not, it's not my job to, I'm not there to interrogate you. I'm not there to, you know, to stick it to the man. I'm just there to find out the information. So once I think they get.

Used to me a little bit and then, you know, I get used to them a little bit, then it can become a little bit more of a conversation after that, isn't it?

Would you compare, you know how like the doctors, right. Like a surgeon or something like this and they gotta cut somebody open Compartmentalized. Yeah. Like for a normal person they'd be like, I don't know if I can cut this person open. But then if you're a doctor, after a while it becomes less of, oh, I'm cutting this person open more. Like this is like a, you know, like a specimen that I have to like work on kind of thing.

Yeah, I think, I mean there is, there are certain degrees of you that you have to compartmentalize. I think for me, I'm always very cautious of not wanting to do that too much because I think my, you know, what I'm trying to do is to really bring a different level of understanding on all sides of it, and I don't want to be too distant. So it's a fine balance. It's sometimes, you know, and sometimes I make it better than others. But.

Yeah, it's really. It's just listening. Often it's just listening. That's what it comes down to.

Seems like after a while, this. Like, all these stories might kind of jam you up.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I did get to that point a little bit, but I'd set boundaries for myself to recognize that, I think. And, yeah, I did get to that.

Point when you say you'd set boundaries for yourself, give us some help, because.

There'S a lot of us that maybe.

Could use some boundaries.

I had certain markers I knew for myself, really, especially because I was spending so much time, and the stories would just get heavier and heavier and heavier, and I would just be living in it, and I'd be living on a floor somewhere. And I didn't have a team. I didn't have people around me beyond my fixes and who I was very close to. But I just knew that I wouldn't be able to do my work effectively if something. Or I was hearing things that were really tragic or something tragic had happened. And I didn't feel anything. And.

I think that moment didn't really come for me during this particular book. I had a couple of moments where I just. I felt very broken a little bit because I felt so helpless, and that happened during that. But I still managed to feel.

You know, everything affected me, and I wanted it to affect me to a degree. And then when I realized I really needed to take a break, was. Was sort of several years after, and it was in. It was in Africa, in East Africa. And I'd interviewed a woman from the Congo who had had, you know, sexual violence, and she'd had these babies out of rape. And just what she went through was so horrific. And she'd been shunned by her community, and she was running, and she was just the most extraordinary woman. And she was so. Her name was Nancy, and she was so strong and amazing. And I just remember sitting with her for hours and with these babies and having that feeling of, oh, my God, I don't. I don't even feel this. I don't. I don't feel anything right now. And that really bothered me that I didn't feel anything. And so after that trip, I. I went home, and I didn't go anywhere, I don't think, for about six or seven months, because I just felt that, yeah, if I'd got to that point of just not reacting. That was not the point that I wanted to get to. And that's when you just have to take a break and that's it. But I think during the process of this book, and I talk about a little bit in the book, but it's often, you know, as a writer, I think it's an advantage because.

You'Re telling stories and so it's almost cathartic. So people are telling you terrible things and you have a way to release it out of your body. Whereas I know a lot of my colleagues who are photographers or videographers sort of in combat, I think that they suffer more, to be honest. And I've heard this from other journalists because maybe they're not getting that same release that I get as a writer, you know, may or may not be true, but that's sort of my experience with it. But I know and I talk about in the book and it's not always the most obvious things that I use the word break you, but it's not always, you know, digging up the mass graves or seeing somebody be killed or, you know, they're horrific things, but for me they weren't the things that, you know, shattered me. The things were.

And there's one that really sticks out for me and that was in, in Sinjar in the city and it had been completely destroyed and a few of these very poor people had moved back to live in these houses where there was no water, no electricity, there was nothing. And because they couldn't afford to live at camps even. And so I remember being there one day and there was a young father and he had two young children and he was just living in his old bombed out house even though there was nothing in there. And he said that he, they were yazidi. And he said that his wife had been taken, the children's mother, and that the captor had called him and said, if you give me X amount of dollars, it was several thousand dollars. Then, you know, I return her. So this poor guy for months walked around and around the village and everybody was trying to give him money and he's selling his furniture and, and you know, doing whatever and he finally comes up with the money and then he calls the captor and says, hey, I've got the money. And he says, oh, the price has doubled. And at that point the man just gave up. He just gave up. He said, I can't, I don't have that. No one else is going to give me any more money. And so he's sitting here with these kids. And I just. And that was the story that really, really cracked me because I felt so helpless. And I thought, I can't even give you money because I would be labeled as a terror, you know, giving my financing a terrorist regime if I did that, because they're paying ISIS to get their women back. But. But to him, that was. That was his wife, that was these children's mother. And just the fact that she's probably not even alive now because he just could not come up with that money and he didn't have the resources to do that. It was just. It was such a helpless feeling, and I. I couldn't help him. And, yeah, that was the moment for me that I was like, this is. This is just insanity. This is ridiculous. And. And there's no reason that this should be happening.

I think when you talk about the fact that writing the stories is an outlet and. And it's something that I talk about with, even with. From a leadership perspective, when I'm talking to leaders about how to make decisions, I say, look, when you write something down, you are detaching from it. It's literally on a piece of paper outside of your head now. And now you can assess it from a different perspective. So I think that. I totally agree that writing is therapeutic because you get it out of your system and now you can see it on the page and you can relate it from a different. From a different perspective.

You know, and it's weird. You also talked about the. You know, at a point where you were in Africa and you're interviewing this woman, and she's been through this absolutely unimaginable horror, and she's pressing on, by the way, and she's carrying forth, and you feel, like, empty. And that's. You describe the Yazidis at many point, at many points of being in that zone where they just have no more emotions left because they've just gotten crushed at every single turn.

And there was. There was one point there and there, telling me all these stories and showing me the pictures of these Yazidi babies that were being burned. And I just. I lost it. And you never want to lose it, you know, especially as a journalist, you never want to cry, you never want to break down. And I just. I. I broke down and I was just bawling in this room. And I just remember I looked up and somebody was handing me tissue. They were all men in the room, Yazidi men, and was with one of their religious leaders. I just looked at every one of those faces. And I thought. And even one of them just looked at me and he said, we just don't react anymore. And I just thought, this is just. It's such a. It's a place beyond. A place that I can, you know, thank goodness. Can never imagine getting to, or hopefully never would, but the depths of what they'd endured, the thousands of people from their community that had been taken and just. It was so hard to Even now, to wrap my head around, but for them, it was just.

They were beyond the point of even reacting to any of it anymore. And they were just so lost and so broken by it all that I just.

Nothing was triggering them anymore. And so here was I feeling terribly unprofessional and crying, but I just. I couldn't. I just couldn't stop. And it was just. Yeah, that was probably the only time I've really done that, but that was. Yeah, it was just a moment for me of realizing that here I was feeling terrible, and they weren't even as upset as I was. And then I had to really realize that they were suffering in a much different way.

Yeah. You also mentioned in the book that at one point you felt like that, and then you kind of had to say, I'm a volunteer here. Like, I'm here because I want to be here. I can be sad, but they can't leave. This is it for them.

Absolutely. And there's always a guilt that comes with that, and it's still something I grapple with. So I can go in and I can spend however long I want to spend their months, weeks, whatever, and you get their stories and you tell their stories, and then you get to go home. I get to get on a plane. I have an American passport, Australian passport. I go home. And they don't. They don't get to go home. They don't get to.

They don't understand, you know what. That in itself being such a luxury, you know, and there's a guilt that I feel with that sometimes in just. In being there. And they don't view it that way. They view it as. Why would you know what a gift it is that someone would want to even come in and tell their story and. And would leave their comfortable home and their families and come and talk to us, and that's how they view it, which is lovely.

But for me, it was always. Yeah. Sense of just feeling a little bit of guilt about it. And I always tried not to be a vulture. I didn't want to go in and have somebody sort of open up and tell Their story. And then I take that story and I leave. And I don't know that it's ever. It's ever going to change anything for them. I don't know that it's ever going to do any good for them. So, yeah, that's something I sit with.

What about the Sun Ladies? Tell us about the Sun Ladies, because this is a cool story.

They were extraordinary. So, yeah, I heard about them and we went to sort of. We went for a long drive to meet them. And they were these extraordinary Yazidi women. Most of them had come from Sinjar. And so when ISIS came in in 2014.

The Yazidis had to flee up the mountain because there wasn't anywhere to go. It was all surrounded at the bottom. And the tragedy of it was so many of them died on that mountain because they starved to death. It was the middle of summer, and Iraq in the summer is something else, but they starved to death. They were describing having to throw children off the mountain because that was going to be a better way for them to die than to die of starvation or dehydration. And that was really what spurred America to get back involved in Iraq was the Yazidi plight. And the fact that what happened to them was just. And there was no. It was so hard to get aid and anything to them. So the women that survived, that formed their own unit that they called the Sun Ladies, the Force of the Sun Ladies, because they wanted to, I think was multiple reasons, but they wanted to. To A, find their women that were still missing, and B, they wanted to be involved in that. In that liberation of getting their towns and villages back. And. And they were just really, really extraordinary women.

They also wanted vengeance.

Yeah, as you would. As you would.

Yeah. No, it's a very cool section in there that you talk about. And they also had.

Real.

A real situation. I mean, I'll just go to the books. We have a lot of our women in Mosul being held as slaves. Their families are waiting for them. We are waiting for them. The liberation might help bring them home. So they're. They're in the situation. They don't just want revenge. They have actual people that they know, their. Their friends, their relatives that are actual slaves.

And they can go help them. And that's what they're trying to do.

You say this when you're. When you're talking to them, but what I also had come to learn about the Yazidis was that when Isis. ISIS had already taken away their hopes and happiness, they would now allow them to take Away their sanity too. The Sun Ladies were strong, always sitting upright. A few tears were shed, but hastily wiped away as the morning melted into afternoon. ISIS had abducted Yazidi girls as young as eight, trading them at the market for a few dollars. I learned of one young mother who was pregnant at the time of capture. She had given birth in the back room of her overlord's home, but was not permitted to feed her newborn son.

The baby cried and cried.

The Muslim militant beheaded him.

The depth of depravity was hard to swallow and we all sat in clouded quietude for a small period. It's important to us to be able to protect our dignity and honor, a 19 year old sun lady named Mesa finally said, softly shattering the wincing silence. My family is very proud. They encouraged me to join. I'm very proud to protect my people. After all that has happened to us Yazidis, we are no longer afraid.

And as brave and stoic as the sun lady seemed to me, there was one thing that did frighten them. The notion that Yazidi boys who had been kidnapped from Mount Sinjar and presumably drugged and brainwashed by ISIS were now fighting their mothers and sisters under the black flag of isis.

We now have terrorist Yazidis, something that never used to be.

So, you know, we hear about child soldiers throughout history, but this idea of what which happened, where they would capture these Yazidi kids that are 7, 8, 9, 10 years old and brainwash them and abuse them and turn them into.

Extremist ISIS terror kids.

And that still is still really, it's still a really big problem for them even I guess, given the lack of resources. So a lot of the boys that are coming back are still, are still very radicalized in, in many ways. And I remember being in a refugee camp or a displacement camp for Yazidis once and hearing just horrific story about how one of the. He must have been probably 6, 6, 7 years old and he'd been rescued and brought back and tried to behead his baby sister.

Zed is his name in.

Back to the Book. One blazing summer afternoon, I traveled the bumpy road a couple hours north to the Office of Kidnapped Affairs. It was perhaps one of the saddest structures I ever entered. Not because the building itself painted a bright sunny yellow, standing indomitable in the middle of a city sprawling, but rather because of what it represented. The office had been established with support from the KRG Prime Minister after the ISIS eruption of 2014 to find, to help find thousands that had gone missing. I would visit that office Many times in the months to come, and every time it would get sadder.

You're talking to one of the individuals there, Zaina. Zayn explained that it was her neighbors, Muslim families that had lived side by side with for generations, who ended up turning on them. One morning, she said, our neighbors came for us. Zana, who was 32 years old, had spent more than a year as an ISIS sex slave. When ISIS came, they said they didn't want to fight us. They told us to give them their weapons. Our weapons. She said, telling me her story all over again. But this time face to face, where it felt cruder and more inescapable. We gave them everything we had. These were our Muslim neighbors. But so many of them had become isis, and we didn't know. Zayna winced as she recollected the day ISIS assaulted her village at the foot of Mount Sinjar. The elderly who could not run fast or far enough were summarily executed. Men and women separated, with older men dragged off to mosques to be killed. The females, including girls as young as 8, were loaded onto car cars and trucks and bound for Mosul. ISIS took me, my sister, my brother's wife and my little sister. For 13 days. We were put in a school. We didn't know what would happen. There were about 50 people, women and children, squashed into a room. There was no water for us to wash ourselves. The children were sick. Zana had lied to her captors, telling them that she was married, hoping somehow it might spare her from their evil intentions. That somehow it would save her from getting robbed of the one thing she could never get back. Her captors, however, were undeterred. She and dozens of others were taken to a heavily guarded building in the ISIS controlled Iraq city of Tal Afar. Yazidi girls under the age of 14 were whisked away and sold at auctions. The remaining women were handed off to ISIS fighters and told they were henceforth their property.

When a fighter grabbed Zana and Carter off to into a dust storm, fear paralyzed her from head to toe. In its official propaganda materials, ISIS justified killing, raping and enslaving Yazidis, calling them devil worshippers and linking them to their mandate to reinstate, reinstitute, Reinstitute slavery.

Raping them. Those unbelievers have become a core tenant of their theology.

Zayn is angry. Impounders threw her into a prison cell. Days later, she was transferred to another facility in Tal Afar and forced to convert to Islam. Under the threat of death, Zayn had already witnessed a dozen fellow Yazidis being executed in cold blood as punishment for their escape attempts. She was not ready to die, but she was not ready to give up on finding her freedom. Zayn and her another Yazidi woman, were sent to live with a jihadist in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul. He took me to this place. They were flats, small tourist flats. It was a tourist community.

Then he raped me.

For the next five months, Zayn remained inside Mosul and was handed off to another militant who locked her in a small room. This is how the game was played.

Rape had always been a weapon of war that thrived on silence. But the Yazidi community was bravely and gradually changing that notion. They were collectively bucking the mortification and the fright and all the repercussions that came with it to speak out and tell the world that they would not be muted. It's a tough situation, Zana admitted with a shrug.

But I am still here.

And I mean, I'm. I'm skipping giant chunks of the book as I'm going through with different details and.

Evil.

And I think I write a fair bit in the book about. About sexual violence because I think it's something that doesn't. It's very uncomfortable to talk about. And it's something that even now we're seeing.

ISIS fighters are not. No, ISIS fighters are being held accountable for that. And there's still this mentality of, these are terrorists, you know, they're killing people, so what do we care about that for? And I think.

We need to start shifting that perspective. They need to be trialed for those crimes as just as important as every other horrific crime that they've committed, because that's something that needs to change. And I think for so long, I mean, it only really officially became illegal in 98, you know, sexual violence in wartime. So it's something that's still relatively new. And I think.

There'S a lot of work that needs to be done in that topic and, you know, within the international community that needs to be looked at and how can that be sort of brought to justice? Otherwise you do have that impunity that's going to continue. And what so many of these women go through, have gone through in so many different conflicts. I think it really deserves a lot more attention than. Than what it gets. But it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to talk about.

Fast forward a little bit here to Fallujah.

The city is damaged, but nothing like the other cities where ISIS has been dislodged. Explained in Iraqi intelligence official who work closely on the Fallujah campaign. This was a well planned operation led by Iraq's Golden Division. The Golden Division was Iraq's special for Special operations forces. It ultimately had been created by US led coalition forces after the 2003 invasion and had received top notch training.

This is a local. Talking about the push through the city. And he said, if the decision was mine, I would have made a statue for every fighter in the battle against terrorism. Those heroes are examples of courage when face, when faced with Daesh.

It was awesome for me to. It's awesome. It was awesome for me to watch as all this stuff was taking place. You know, obviously I retired in 2010, but when we worked with the Iraqis, a lot of times the Iraqi soldiers, they weren't very determined and it was, you know, they would, they would have a lot of hard times sticking to the fight. And we had an entire battalion one time leave the battlefield. And so that was not a great.

That'S not a great look. Right. And so when I started getting reports back from my friends that were in Mosul with the Iraqis and the Iraqis were fighting, they were fighting. And not just in Mosul, but in Ramadi, in Fallujah, the Iraqis were fighting. And it was, it was. So that's kind of why I mentioned that, because I, I had worked with some of the troops that trained up the Iraqi Special Forces, the Iraqi Special Special Operations Forces, and they did take the lead and it was awesome to see their courage and that they were going in, they were fighting, they took massive casualties. In Mosul, they took massive casualties. My friend told me that in the first few days they thought to themselves, we, not the Iraqis, might run out of troops because they are taking so many casualties. I can tell you, when we were in Ramadi in 2006, they wouldn't have taken that many casualties because they wouldn't have continued to fight. They would have run away. And so here this. They were fighting for a cause that they believed in. And it was awesome to see that taking place.

Yeah. And I really noticed also just in between 2014, 2019, just that trajectory and how much over that time, I guess that their will to win was really compounded. And yeah, by the end of it, I mean, they would, They've seen some of the most horrific combat that you can begin to imagine. I mean, just the level of what they've experienced for those that have gotten through it is really remarkable.

You know, I can't. There's some of these examples that you give of who this enemy was. I just I just have to read them.

Every day for three months. They tortured me. A zero called from where he sat stranded on the Assyrian side of the shuttered Turkish border. But after a while, the torture just became routine. He was one of the thousands of prisoners arrested by ISIS for so called crimes like wearing western jeans or smoking a cigarette. But he was also one of a select few who had managed to claw their way out of the terrorist group's dungeons with all his limbs intact.

Short of jail, liberated by opposing forces, such escapes were considered rare.

Just.

Another, another one, Nasra, another former captive.

ISIS told us, we will give you safety if you give up your weapons.

But they lied to us. They took our weapons and they arrested us. Many of Nasra's fellow soldiers had had since been executed, but many remained incarcerated. There was no rights or to attorneys, due process, trials, or even a phone call. He estimated that as many as 2000 Iraqi armor soldiers had been slain since succumbing to ISIS over the past two years. He also estimated that 5,000 at that time remained in prison bowels across the country.

The cages were so small, Nasra said, that their torsos were marked by the folds of skin and their limbs, tinged blue from the hours of crouching, curled like a fetus in the womb.

Women arrested by ISIS typically disappeared behind the prison's exterior, held separately from the men, and were often never seen again.

Children are not exempt from the torment either. A large number of children have been arrested by isis. My friend Hassam, a member of the Syrian activist group Raqqa, is being slaughtered silently, he explained. The most common charges are insulting Allah and cooperating with apostates. They are being tortured just like men, and some of them have died under torture. They torture children too, mostly flogging, beating on the hands and feet, and psychological torture. I was administered with electric shocks. My bones were broken. I was hung by my feet from the ceiling and beaten with my hands tied behind my back, said Ali, a professional in his mid-40s who had been arrested in the early days of the terrorist onslaught on suspicion of being an atheist.

They swore on a Quran that I would be cut to pieces.

You make a note here. You can take a life without killing. That's what torture does.

Between the summers of 2015 and 2016, ISIS had been on especially vicious rampage. To compensate for the loss of seasoned soldiers and to take into drugging those it radicalized or first forced into its lair, ISIS is using special tablets. The fighters take drugs and they don't know where they are or what they are doing. They are just shooting and fighting, one Kurdish intelligence official explained. They lose their minds. Some can be shot 20 times before they go down. That ominous drug was known as Captagon, is that right? A methamphetamine like variant of the banned pharmaceutical fentanyline. It was manufactured in copious quantities, primarily in Lebanon and neighboring Syria, where it was sold to ISIS through middlemen.

It removes any barriers you would have to fighting. There is no second guessing. They just go out and kill.

It's still a very common battlefield drug, often comes from Lebanon or Syria.

And yeah, it's. Unfortunately, it goes just beyond isis, but it's a very common. It's becoming a very common drug that a lot of militias and even government soldiers are sort of being given to give them that sense of invincibility to have them go out there and do whatever they're told. And I think, yeah, it really gained prominence under isis.

With little kids.

Yeah, yep. Struggling them up.

Among the ranks of captured brainwashed and drugs drugged, were scores of Yazidi boys whose minds had been twisted to turn against their own people. They had been propelled into training regimes that included Islamist indoctrination and weapons instruction. They had been forced into learning the finer points of beheading, forced into becoming suicide bombers and into serving as human shields.

Did your.

Perception of.

Evil change while you were there?

I think in the beginning, I perhaps had a little bit more of a black and white.

Perspective on it, which I think, you know, especially in the US.

We tend to sort of think.

Which I think is completely wrong, but we tend to always. It always comes down to a religion thing. And that always is often painted as the motivating factor. And I think what I really learned.

For people that were joining ISIS, it was really one of five things or one of 10 things that was motivating them to join. And so I think the complexities for me really grew in that because I suddenly started to see ISIS is absolutely evil. And that hasn't changed for me. But what I started to see was the complexities of how they got to that point and why they joined. And it wasn't so black and white, really. And that majority of them really were joining more out of a necessity for survival than it necessarily was.

Some kind of, you know, religious extreme. In religious extremism, however, there is a difference between the ones that were coming, foreigners were coming, and they were often a lot more extreme in that respect. What I found for the Iraqis in particular that were joining was that a lot of them, you know, ISIS had come in and taken over their town or their village and they still needed to feed their family. So, you know, those kind of complexities grew for me in, it was a lot harder to look at things in, in such sort of black and white terms.

Yeah, I think you're right that America definitely misses the point on that a lot. It was always, I still have conversations with people that will talk to me about, or they'll come at me about, you know, we had no reason to be fighting the Iraqis. And I was like, hey, we were fighting alongside the Iraqis. They were literally going into the same buildings with us. That's what they were doing that we were, we weren't fighting against the Iraqis, we were fighting against the insurgents that were there. Same thing with the, what you mentioned about.

You know, how are we gonna, how am I gonna feed my family? There's plenty of 14, 17, 19, 22 year old young male Iraqis that wanted money. And how are they going to get money? Well, there's someone over here that's going to pay them $50 to go shoot an RPG at the Coalition forces and that's what they're going to do. And they weren't jihadists, they were little hoodlums. Just like a little hoodlum in America. That's. How are you going to make a living in America in some crappy city where you don't have any opportunities, oh, I'm going to be a drug dealer or I'm going to be a gangbanger because somebody's going to pay me, you know, to go and carry this from here to there. It's an economic decision more than anything else. And you know, even when they're talking about, you know, if it's a religious thing. Well, it can't be a religious thing because we've got, it's the actual Muslims fighting against the Muslims. It's not like there's, there's, it's not about that. And what the other crazy thing is, you know, when you, when you talk to people and you know, I would explain, well, you know, we were working with oftentimes a majority Shia army and it would be hard for them to interact with the Sunnis and people have no, they don't understand what you're talking about.

And that was a big, you know, with ISIS is, you know, you disband and an entire, you know, the Sunnis were very disbanded after Saddam and yet they still had their weapons. And they're out on the street and feeling, you know, persecuted by, by the government. And so what are they going to do. They're going to band together. It was the same people. It wasn't anything new. I think ISIS was sort of looked at as this group that came out of nowhere and dropped from the sky. Well, no, they. They were always there. They just kind of came together at some point.

When you mentioned Baghdadi, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, al Baghdadi, we. My task unit in Ramadi in 2006 went to go and capture or kill him. Had a mission to go capture, kill him and didn't get him. It's actually the. It's actually the opening story story. Leif Babin was the ground force commander on that operation. They got into a big gunfight because there was security there, which means he was probably in that vicinity. But you're right. Well, it's not. These aren't. They didn't drop in the sky. This was a guy that had been there and fought as an insurgent and was on the run and constantly trying to maneuver. And so, yeah, these people didn't drop from the sky. And you know, the other crazy thing that you can compare to a lot of bad situations in the world where what they want is there to be problems, what the insurgents want is to create division. Right, Division. And they would go and bomb Shia mosques just to get the Shias to lash out at the Sunnis and then the Sunnis. They were trying to create a civil war. And it was very, very hard to walk that line and make sure that you're doing this in a proper way. And even when we. In Ramadi, when we got there in 2006, I thought we were just going to do a big sweep through like we did like, like the Marines did in Fallujah, just go and rubble every building and just run through it. And Maliki, the prime minister, who was a Shia, knew that if he did that, it would be bad. It would be bad. And so he said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do it in a more sparing way, as with minimal force required. And that's what we did. There was still force required, but it was a lot less kinetic than Fallujah was. So, yeah, I'll tell you. But all that being said, I.

The evil that's perpetrated is just absolutely horrific. And you capture it in this book. And what scares me the most about it, it is how easily people are swayed towards it. Doesn't take much to push somebody over the line from being a normal person to beheading children.

Which is horrific. And, you know, I Did one podcast on the, on the My Lai massacre.

And there was roughly 500 old men, women and children, no military age males there at all. 500 murdered, raped, mutilated. And reading the interviews with the guys that perpetrated this, and you read their backgrounds and you read where they came from and you read what they did.

You can't. We have to be on the lookout for this kind of stuff because these guys committed heinous atrocities equivalent of ISIS atrocities. And they were Americans that had.

Cross over the line.

Absolutely. And I really think, you know, and this is something I found in Afghanistan, in, in Syria and Iraq and a lot of other places that we, when I say we, we just don't give enough attention to, and that is government corruption. And how much of these things are a symptom of that. You know, if you have to pay someone every time you're going to go through a checkpoint, you know, so that some policeman can line his pocket if you have to. If you see your leaders rolling around with, you know, in these fancy cars and big houses and Rolexes and you're not, you know, you can't get by, you're sweeping in the street and still not getting any services, then at some point it's going to make you angry. And when you're angry enough, I also think it's a big factor for joining a lot of these groups to sort of rise up against their own governments. And I think it's something that when I talk to officials about it, they're often so quick to throw up their hands. We can't do anything about that. That's just a systemic problem. Okay, but you're always going to be dealing with terrorism as a systemic problem from that problem because corruption is just such a huge driver of it in every way, shape or form. And I just think it's something that gets barely any attention when it's such a big, A big reason why these groups exist and continue to exist and will continue to exist.

Yeah, you have that, you have that little bit of anger in the back of your mind that you're being oppressed. And then someone comes along and says, hey, you can fight that oppression with us. And I'm in. Let's do this.

Yeah.

Fast forward a little bit. What does war look like?

It isn't just blistered buildings and empty brass casings and displacement camps. War looks like wounds and soldiers who don't resemble fierce fighters, but are men in unfathomable pain.

Soldiers belong to someone. They are a mother's child. Someone created them. And brought them into the world only for the world to rip them apart.

And for what was it worth? Was always the question in my mind, but ever the hardest to ask.

Soldiers and medical staff, you go into a, into a hospital. Soldier and medical staff faced a fight of a different kind. No money and no medicine to treat almost 9,500 that had been seriously wounded. The tiny hospital, if one could even call it that, had no MRI equipment or seizures, CT scanners. It reminded me of poor clinics, of a Soviet time and place.

There were thousands of open, unresolved case files. Several soldiers, young faces, old faces and with body parts gone, came forward to outline their predicaments and pain, to reconstruct the blows to their bodies. I feverishly jotted down all I could in my fraying notebook.

And you go through just talking to soldiers and.

Their, their horrific wounds that they're, you know. Pawan Ismail been diffusing a roadside bomb for Peshmerga on Christmas Eve in 2014. When it exploded, his two comrades died. Much of his body was burned and his thigh skin had been reduced to ash.

Karwan said, 37 years old, proudly dressed in his soldier's uniform. He's one of the victims of the ISIS chemical attack.

Kaiter Merker, 42 years old, 25 year old Peshmerga serviceman ambushed by an ISIS vehicle.

Around from a PKM machine gun cleaved below his left ear and lodged a few millimeters from the top disc in his back. The round remained there, infected and inflamed. His hands were numb, his head ached persistently.

Bazaar Hussein, 32 year old, been working on the front lines.

Struck by a sniper's bullet in broad daylight. Reduced from a strong able bodied man to an almost infantile physical and mental state, Hussein could no longer control his legs nor could he control his head and eye movements. Occasionally he could speak slowly, other times his eyes just swelled with confused tears as the words would not come out.

These men had been robbed of bones and body parts that could not grow back. Some had lost their minds, but none had lost their self respect. They were heroes who did not look like conventional heroes but constituted what the Hollywood depiction of heroes should have been.

And once again to your earlier point Holly, of.

When you read 40 were wounded or 12 were wounded or 7 were wounded or a thousand were wounded the way you do. And I, I just breezed through those. I didn't go into the detail that you go into some of the backstory, but every one of those little statistics is a person.

Going back to Tal Afar.

This is a, here's a tactic. When the people came, when the people from town heard that Kirkuk had been taken over by isis, many came out to the streets to celebrate. So this is what we're talking about. You got people that, you got the Shia power and you've got ISIS taking over Kirkuk and now the Sunnis come out and say, yeah, let's celebrate. And then what happens with all the families out in the street? ISIS members then exist, executed their scheme and had the trucks ready and filled them with young boys and imported them to the front lines.

ISIS has used all sorts of tactics and human shields many times. Before.

ISIS was using the young boys for three main functions, functions on their fateful front line as direct fighters, as human shields, and as suicide bombers.

One soldier showed me a video of the remnants of a cauterized truck and told me the three inside were just kids taken from the Tal Afar streets just a day earlier.

What is war? War is the reason you wake up. There is no life outside of the conflict. You eat and breathe when you're in it. It is impossible to have a life outside or even to if you attempt the ritualistic movements of daily life.

The soldiers I met may have had their families, but war always came first. It was not a choice. They had no option but to live it and breathe it.

They had all abandoned their studies or deserted their livestock or quit their jobs to defend their people for a poultry paycheck. A paycheck that often did not come on time, if at all, all.

There was no time for anything but war.

How often are you going in and out of country during this time?

God, I lost count of the amount of trips.

Would you, would you normally stay from month?

Yeah, it varied. Some points.

Some points that, you know, I'd go in and do a trip for a few weeks. Other points I would go in and end up doing a trip for a few months. I just, I often left it very open ended depending on getting what I needed. So, yeah, it was sort of a lot of going in and out and then I'd go to other countries in between it all. So I was going to cover other conflicts kind of at the same time and then I would just go back or I'd spend a chunk of time, you know, back in the US and then go back and spend a chunk of time. It was sort of just whatever I could get that I felt I needed to go back for. And then it was all just very.

Arbitrary as to how long I thought I needed to be there for.

Is there any of your work driving this? Is there stories that you owe or anything like that? Just from a pragmatic perspective?

Nothing sort of pragmatic in that sense. It was more. Yeah, it was more just trying to develop it as it, as it needed to be, I guess, in that very organic sense.

We've talked about the sun ladies. We've talked about some. I think we've talked about some of the other Peshmerga females.

There are females on the other side as well, females of the Caliphate.

I got 15 years, one plump 54 year old woman said, flopping onto the office couch, for being an ISIS terrorist. I wanted to be a suicide bomber.

You refer to this female as ks KS wanted to tell her story in a jagged timeline, a biography bound by battles. She was the daughter of an Arab father and a Kurdish mother. She grew up speaking her grandfather's language of Turkmen. She ended up in isis. After her marriage fell apart. I wanted a divorce. I was very poor. I have schizophrenia and was just diagnosed with blood cancer. And my only daughter wasn't treating me well. I was borrowing money from people for the treatment. Chaos lamented, eyes welling. But then I grew desperate. In the obscure days after Mosul, I was snatched. After Mosul was snatched by ISIS In June of 2014, when the terrorist group was quickly capturing territory across Iraq. She had detailed her situation to a cab driver named Mahmoud in her home city of Kirkuk. He offered her a solution. He was ISIS and said if I joined, they would treat me well and pay me. I said I would join on one condition, that they make me a suicide bomber and get me out of my misery. The only thing I was seeking was to be bombed and die.

So again, you were pointing out.

Who.

Becomes ISIS and why. And there you go. Here you have someone that's schizophrenic, has all these problems in their life. And you know, you see the same thing in cults in America, right? You take someone that's been abused, you take someone that's down on their luck, and that's who cults actually go after. They go after people like that for the most part. And this is a classic situation, psychological issues, divorced.

Being treated bad by her daughter. There you go.

Yeah. And she, you know, in the, when I was sitting with her and she's sort of vacillating between this laughing and crying and it was all, it was all very bizarre. But I talked in length with one of the guards that was in the room at the time when she was telling me her story. And you know, she's sort of painting herself to be this very innocent person. But there's two sides to the story and the other side being that she was, was really evil and she was one of the people that was, was taking these Yazidi women and helping facilitate them to be sold and, and beating them and things. So you know, it's, it's just a very complicated situation in that.

Colonel Marwan Sabri of the Yazidi Peshmerga battalion recalled that in March 2017, a disillusioned American. I'm moving from females, this is to Westerners amongst the ranks.

A disillusioned American surrendered himself to the Peshmerga. He had begged them not to shoot him. That fighter turned out to be 26 year old old Mohammed Jamal Khawis from Virginia, who was later deported to Virginia's Eastern District for indictment. A 20 year old, 20 year jail sentence handed down October 2017 awaited him.

And you go through some of these other Westerners.

Males, females, coming in from first world countries, coming in from America, coming in from parts of Europe to go giving up. It's crazy, crazy.

Their recruitment campaign for foreigners was pretty extensive.

Moving forward into the book, all tools in the war against ISIS had eventually pointed to Mosul. It was the ISIS bread and butter, the head of the snake.

I learned that many Mosul civilians, innocent souls who had managed to survive over three years of ISIS occupation, were slaughtered in retaliation as Iraqi forces surrounded the city. To have made it this far, just to be taken out in the twilight of the fight jarred me. Their body parts were strewn across dusty street streets, tiny bodies cracked open, left to die after their fleeing parents were gunned down. Some hiding underneath the bloody corpses of their family members, orphaned and forever traumatized.

I remembered the howls of a broken woman. Her little daughter had been lost for days until she was found with nothing but a gaping black hole where the back of her head used to be.

Suicide belts are strapped onto helpless civilians, including women and children by isis. Karim of the Iraqi counterterrorism forces conjectured this was a big dilemma. We didn't know who a bomber was and who was not. Many of our men died from these people forced to be bombers.

This is one of the things that when my friends were over there and they were reporting back, they'd have these kids, women, children, men coming to checkpoints strapped with bombs and the predicament that they were in. But then also the great lengths that the Americans made to try and spare the lot. Because what you normally do with a suit well, obviously a suicide bomber. What do you do? You could kill them. And what do you do with a roadside bomb or an ied? You blow it. You what we do, we call it blowing in place. So you just go put a explosive charge near it and you blow it up and then it's safe. What you don't want to have to do, you do have to do it sometimes. But you don't have to go up there with a whatever like a, like a, an action movie with a pair of pliers and a wire cut and actually disarm that thing because it's dangerous. And by the way, the way they build those bombs, oftentimes when you cut one wire, it's rigged to blow up and that somehow causes detonation anyways. So what they had in many of these cases were these kids or innocent people that had these bombs trapped and go walk into the checkpoint.

Certainly complicates. And it's.

There's no easy solution to that.

Yeah, you know, we talked about, on a few podcasts ago, we talked about the idea of total war, which is at the far extreme of conflict. Right. Total war. We will do absolutely any. And you asked me, Echo Charles, you asked me, give me like, is there any examples of total war? And I said, isis. They did. There was no boundaries, zero boundaries to what they would do. I mean, America pretty much always operates in some, there's some cap now you could say World War II. Once we dropped the atomic bombs, it was like, hey, this is total war, and we are going to do whatever it takes to win as quickly as possible. That's, that's how you can make a decision to say, hey, we're going to drop these atomic weapons.

But other than that, you know, there's always rules of engagement, there's always Geneva Convention, there's all these constraints. But if you want to talk about just total war, we will do absolutely anything to, and stoop to any level of barbarity to try and achieve victory. This is an example.

Female ISIS members were said to have stooped to weaponizing their own babies. Seemingly harmless mothers carrying their babies had been trained to enter areas thick with Iraqi soldiers only to blow themselves up, their young and their liberators around them to bits.

An enemy is most dangerous when on the defensive or when they are fighting for survival. This was not an easy fight, and ISIS was not the JV team. ISIS did not care for rules of engagement by which the west was taught to fight. ISIS did whatever it would take to achieve its strategic objectives, regardless of the consequences. There you go, you and me on the same page.

President Trump gave a free hand to his then Defense Secretary Mattis, who in May stressed military commanders were no longer slowed by Washington decision cycles or by the White House micromanaging that existed with President Obama. As a result of the new approach, the fall of ISIS in Iraq, at least in. In terms of territory, came even more swiftly than hardened US Military leaders expected. It moved more quickly than at least I had anticipated. Brigadier General Croft said. We and the Iraqi security forces were able to hunt down and target ISIS leadership, target their command and control.

So I kind of heard that a lot from the leadership when I was interviewing them. I think that was in the end of 2017, and that was sort of the reoccurring theme, was that they were given more of a free hand and they were sort of able to push forward. I could look at that, you know, in hindsight, in many different ways, and, you know, how that could be interpreted. But, you know, that was the narrative on the ground at the end of 2017, was that they felt that they were given more support than they had been in the past.

Yeah, I think that. And it's also very interesting when you look at the fact that this is General Mattis, right? This is General Mattis who's saying this. And obviously General Mattis and President Trump, in the end, were not friendly, which it shows you how very caustic Trump's leadership could be or could become if you crossed him.

And it didn't start out that way. Clearly, you know, at some point they were seeing out a way.

It's. It's what I love about this. And what I. What I. Is, this is decentralized command. This is saying, okay, listen, I'm the President. There's bad guys there. I don't care what you do. What I want them, I want them gone. I want that problem solved. Commander's on the ground. Okay, we're gonna go solve it. Yeah, that's what I said. Go solve it. That's. That's a great sign, right? That's a great sign.

And obviously, I guess the disease of victory, as General Patton used to call it, meaning, hey, we won this thing, now everyone should just listen to me more. I mean, that's what you have to watch out for. You can't let your ego make you think that just because you made one good decision, you're going to make all good decisions. Doesn't work that way. But this is just, again, very revealing of how confusing Donald Trump's leadership could be, that you could have that he could have completely empowered General Mattis to go and solve this problem. And then a couple years later, General Mattis leaves.

Yeah. And I think it really started that way with Iraq, with Afghanistan. Go do what the job needs to do to be done. And my understanding from talking to different people at the White House at the time was that President Trump knew he's not, you know, he is the commander in chief, but was the commander in chief, but isn't a military guy. So he kind of. He gave that job to the generals to do. And then at some point, I feel like that shifted and the love that he sort of had for the men then somehow sort of changed. I'm not entirely privy to what happened there, but there was definitely a shift at some point.

Yeah, it was all very strange to watch from the outside.

General McMaster is another guy that was on his staff who is, from everything I understand, I've never met with him. I've never. We've covered some of his stuff on. On this podcast because he's.

Very. From everything I've understood, he's one of the most respected guys. He worked up in Tal Afar. My brigade commander, when I was in Ramadi, had relieved him in Tal Afar. He'd done an amazing job in Tal Afar, bringing stability to that city. We used that plan in Ramadi. So McMaster is just a very well respected. And he was gone. General Kelly, same thing. I mean, just.

A Marines Marine.

Whose son was killed in Afghanistan, and he ends up. So you're sitting there. It causes a lot. It's obvious that it's very hard to logically track the thought patterns of President Trump. You can't really just. There's some inconsistency there that you just. It's just confusing. But at this time, it was very clear. This is another great. Another thing that is very positive. It says here we. We really had one mandate, and that was tenable for Iraqi security forces to defeat ISIS militarily here in Al Anbar. I feel we have achieved that mission. Folsom said. I never felt constrained in a lot of ways. I felt liberated because we had a clear mandate and there was no questioning that.

We were able to focus on what our job was without distraction. And I think that goes a long way in what we are trying to accomplish here. So that's another thing. It was a very clear mission. And I'm sure General Mattis drove a lot of that to say, okay, what do you want us. What is it you want us to do? Because if you don't Have a clear mission.

Well, I mean, I didn't even say anything else. If you don't have a clear mission, what are you trying to do?

Yeah. And that mission was defeat isis. And it became very complicated, I think, because everybody wanted to argue, well, what does defeat ISIS mean? Or people thought, well, if we don't, if we leave Syria, then that leaves it open to, you know, all sorts of other things. But in Trump's mind, I think it was clear it was defeat ISIS militarily, at least, not defeat the ideology of isis. I think that's going into a whole different rabbit hole. But in terms of territory.

Arguably, yes, that was something that was achieved.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And killed a lot of them.

Tens of thousands of ISIS fighters were killed.

I'm going to fast forward a little bit.

You talk from every, like I said, your effort to capture many different perspectives. And one of the perspectives that you capture here is of the Iraqi Christians.

And I had to read this part just because it's very moving. Scores of Iraqi, Iraqi Christians in the region who earlier fled in fear. Neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey weren't much better off. Father Afram said.

Am I saying that name right? Afram. They had waited years for visas to Western nations, only to be rejected. Now the refugees were stranded, did not have money or the courage to resettle. In other pockets of Iraq, those fortunate enough to have been granted visas had to watch their families be split apart. Some members lived in the U.S. others in Europe, and still others were strewn across the Middle East. What was. What is war? It was options. Almost all bad.

This war ever bring about options that be could be considered good. That sense of helplessness hung in the air during Sunday's service. Women in aphrodic mantillas sang and prayed, and the men struck candles to illume the darkened space, while tiny children played outside in the cold sunshine. ISIS destroyed all the crosses, crosses that had been made 150 years ago. Father Ephraim said, but I said to my people.

Make new crosses.

You note in here again, you have a couple modes. I'd say 10% of the book is sort of history.

Facts to give context around. One of the history lessons that you give us is that in 2003, as the Americans invaded for the first time into Iraq, there's 1.5 million Christians, and in 2019, there's 200,000 Christians in Iraq.

Yeah. And there's two sort of very different schools of thought. I think in that is that one being a lot more effort should be made to ensuring that they do stay. You know, that's the land, that's their homeland, Iraq essentially. So that or the second thought being they're going to continue to be persecuted regardless of whether it's isis, whether it's government, whether it's an Al Qaeda, irrespective of that, their lives are in danger. So everything needs to be done to sort of bring them out and have them resettle in Europe or the United States. So there's two very, it causes quite a schism I think in that community because there's just two very divergent thoughts on what the, the better alternative to that is. Help them stay or help them leave.

Whole section here. ISIS wives in Fighting, Jealousy and regrets.

And this is where you know, you started. I didn't dive too much into it. You said you were talking about the, the recruitment system that they had in Europe and I kind of moved past it. I didn't mean to like ignore that, but it's just that you address it a little bit more here. Lena Frizzler was a 28 year old blue eyed blonde with milky pale skin from Hamburg, Germany. She was once an aspiring business student with European dream of money, travel, family and success. In 2012 she married, converted to Islam and left the comforts of her home for Turkey. She said that she had made the abrupt decision after being quartered and encouraged by a note known radical Salafists in the Hamburg area. She called him Pierre Vogel who urged others to rise up and fight against the Bashar Al Assad Syrian regime. Her husband also came under Pierre's spell. One day my husband came home and told me he wants to go to Syria and fight.

Lina told me matter of factly as she nursed her one year old son, her second child, with an ISIS fighter.

And that goes back to what I said earlier with the government, the corruption. How much of this is a symptom of, of that bigger problem that we tend to ignore. And that's what I found a lot with the, these women and these fighters that were especially the foreigners. Yes, some were going very specifically to join isis, but there was this sort of whole group that went before ISIS was even a thing and their mandate was to go and fight Bashar. And so I think that sort of, we, we tend to sort of overlook how much of a symptom, you know, it is of a government problem.

Another German native, a stunning Raven haired 26 year old named Heidi Ralphie told me she spent most of her days alone in a tent. She said she had fallen in love with an old older boy in 2009. Then, several years into the relationship, he informed her that he was going to help the people of Syria that were suffering as a result of the war and Bashar al Assad. Lovestruck, Heidi ditched her social network, her social work studies, for a life of a jihadi wife. In 2014, her beloved Kareem later died on the battlefield. She remarried. Here's the remarrying. It was an easy process. There was an ISIS man we all knew with a laptop and he, he would just ask us what we wanted and bring us guys to choose. I met three, but chose a man from Kosovo, blinded by shrapnel, because he wanted to go to Turkey for an operation. That was my out. So she was trying to get out now. She never made it across the border. Months dragged on. She wanted to return home to Germany. I was in love. It was a mistake.

And often these women, when they tried to get out, they'd get money. Someone from home would send them money and they'd pay, you know, what they called a smuggler or whatever to get them out. And the smuggler would just take the money and drive them round and round and round in a few circles and drop them back. So it sort of became this, you know, Hotel California. You go in, but you can, and you can never leave. So that was sort of the reoccurring theme with the women. I found too, that even if they wanted to, they couldn't.

Kalaa Ahmed, a 43 year old, departed Karachi, Pakistan with her husband and children to fight for the Syrian people. My husband was distraught after seeing a UNICEF documentary about the war in Syria. He wanted to go fight Bashar. My husband sold our house and all our things for us to leave. He used to be a normal man, worked in telecommunications, but he saw that documentary and he made a mind change.

And like, you know, like we, like you've been saying, that's what kind of underlying issues.

Were in his head, right? What was going on? Could he not get ahead at work? You know, could he. Was he not getting the support that he needed? What was going on? You have to add in all these other factors.

Another one.

This is a. This is a male. Born to Moroccan parents in the idyllic countryside just outside of Brussels, Hamza was well known in his community, revered for his soccer and boxing skills. His last job was with DHL Delivery Service. Hamza admitted that in 2011, he came, became more militant in his ideological views after being introduced to a Salafist group called Sharia for Belgium. The group called for the overthrow of democracy and urged young people to join ISIS abroad. Almost two years after he heeded the call and set out for the battlefield, the organization would be formally designated as a terrorist group by the Belgian state. Hamza was first placed at an immigrant's location in the opposition bastion of Eadlib, where he was housed alongside several western fighters. After two weeks he spent, he was sent for 40 days of training, weapons, fitness, religious doctrine. After that, he was deployed to the northern city, Syrian city of Aleppo to fight. I just wanted to give people some kind of a indication.

Hamza particularly remembered the ISIS celebrations after the 2014 beheading of American journalist James Foley and how leaders use the gruesome event as motivation. It was to say, look how we are fighting the Americans, he continued, underscoring that ISIS initially gained momentum after the formation of a coalition of over 60 allied nations designated to defeat them, Designed to defeat them. The coalition's creation was spun by the ISIS propaganda machine to show how strong the militant group was against such a massive force. Hamza repeatedly emphasized in the interview that the ideology driving ISIS was not going to stop and had permeated some circles so profoundly that it would be next to impossible to defeat.

He also said each new incarnation of the group brought a school of thought even more rigid than its predecessor. A central tenet of ISIS brainwashing of new followers was its singular focus on the United States, Hamza said, in what. What he described as an obsession with America. It was the big enemy.

Got to have somebody to fight against.

Absolutely.

Got to have a bad guy. We're the good guys. You got to have a bad guy.

America makes a very nice bad guy for much of the world.

Yeah. And there's always going to be a different cause. You know, that's what I always found, too, is that you could, I'll use example of. Of Guantanamo Bay, so you could close that down. But they're going to find another cause. So there's always going to be a cause. There's always going to be a reason. And so I think we think.

You close one thing down, you.

Create a Palestinian state. Whatever the reason is, there's always going to be another one. And that's something that I think people don't really want to recognize also when it comes to policy is that you can't have these arbitrary lines between war and peace necessarily. I mean, those days are long gone with terrorist groups like this. It's just something that I think we have to learn to manage to some degree. And I hate saying that, because I want to be able to say that it can be totally defeated. But I don't think that's realistic.

I.

Think maybe I hope.

Maybe I just hope. But I. I always hope that.

Human beings intrinsic.

Motivation for freedom.

Will rise eventually to a very positive place in the world.

I hope so too. I really do.

I'm not even sure I believe my own hope. That's what my hope is, though. I said I hope. Yeah, I think. And what's unfortunate is, you know, you see various places in the world where freedom rises and that my theory. Right. Would be that once it rises, it's going to move forward. Right. And unfortunately we see it recede. I mean, Iran's a great example. Right. I mean, the freedom in Iran in the 60s and 70s was completely on the rise and it absolutely receded.

Totally.

So maybe, maybe my hope is misplaced.

You know, I think in Syria too, in the beginning with the revolution, the Arab Spring, you. There were freedom fight. You know, it was a legitimate sort of movement of wanting a better life that wasn't under the Bashar Al Assad dictatorship. But what happened was it got hijacked by a lot of these terrorist groups and jihadists who then I guess diluted that opposition. And then it became this very. Again, it wasn't black and white. It was an incredibly complicated mixture of opposition with a lot of them being good, solid, wanting to live a better life, and then a lot of them being these awful terrorists. So, you know, that. That in itself was something I think was really hijacked and diluted.

Yeah, that story. And you do a very good job in this. Of kind of showing some of those strange alliances. Very strange alliances that took place. And what do you make of those strange alliances? Who are you aligned with? And wait a second, what happens when we're done with this job? And all of a sudden I look my person. That just helped me and. And realize that they've got a whole nother idea where they're heading.

I mean, Iran worked to defeat ISIS too. And look at how the US policy is with Iran. I mean, the friend of your friend is not your enemy. Or not.

Yeah, exactly. That's the thing is that old saying is.

That saying just goes around in circles.

Yeah.

You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fast forward past some of this, some of these horrors. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pass the.

Past the battle. You know, you. You detail some of the stuff of Mosul and you definitely talk about Raqqa and in Syria. And I'm gonna fast forward and again, I'm just gonna. I have to. Otherwise I just sit here and read this entire book and I. I don't want to have.

But we get to a point where the cleanup is now happening and this is at the end of the book and the cleanup is happening in Missoul, and in this particular case there's cleanup happening in Tal Afar.

And.

I'll just go to the book. 40 miles west of Missoul, Tal Afar had a population of about 100,000 before being captured by ISIS in June of 2014. The city was liberated in October of 2017. Remnants of war were everywhere. Bodies found around and under homes, I learned, were not uncommon. Neither was the smell of putrefied flesh.

In many cases, families living under ISIS rule were forced to bury bodies in their own homes and backyards, as well as in local public squares. Sometimes victims were made to dig their own shallow graves.

The 43 person emergency division was tasked only with removing civilian remains from mass graves. The larger 700 person Nivena Civil Defense Corps was in charge of sweeping up bodies from the streets and collecting them from individuals, from individual, from within individual homes.

The first wasted life to be wretched up from the sewage was that of an Iraqi soldier.

His bones, a blood drenched uniform and a pair of handcuffs were exhumed.

Then came seven more, all dragged from beneath a home that had once served as a local headquarters. Headquarters of isis.

Local officials who had been tipped off to the presence of the remains just a couple days earlier said the victims were likely held in the basement.

Across the street. At a second location, another 12 decomposed civilian bodies were exhumed.

Among the remains found were those of at least two children.

And dismembered heads. Without bodies.

Each skeleton bore a thick black blindfold. Most of the victims appeared to have been slain execution styles, bullets showered into the backs of their heads.

It was a massacre.

More and more of the same, one police official told me.

A police official always accompanied the recovery workers through their day's work, a standard practice. It's never ending, the official continued, staring out into the yellow fog which lifted into the bright sunshine. As the day passed on.

Officials had become all too familiar with the discovery of ISIS victims.

Our duty is to the innocent people under the rubble.

Said Hamadi Al Hussein, commander of the Civil Defense Corps emergency convoy unit. He explained to me over cold tea the night before, isis kills them and throws them into the sewage one by one and covers it over with cement. This is their way.

After several grueling hours with small children watching from low lying rooftops above, 20 body bags were sealed and handed over to Iraqi federal police.

Law enforcement took them to a specialized committee for examining the bodies. Whenever possible, surviving family members of the victims were notified.

For Dawad Daoud Salaam Mahmoud Ali, a 44 year old rescue worker from Mosul, considered something of a hero among his peers for excavating the bodies for 27 years, it was a job that never got easier.

Sometimes it's five or six entire families all buried in one house, he told me after losing after hosing himself off behind the fire truck at the end of a shift in Tal Afar. As a father, especially when I see women and children, it hurts.

I've had to pull out many pregnant women too.

Daoud said he and his Team had recovered 2,400 bodies since Missoul was liberated last July, with more than 2,000 of those coming from the old city on the west side. In Talifan Far, they had recovered 640 bodies, many of whom were still unidentified.

Another 500 bodies were discovered last year in a mass grave between the two strongholds.

It wasn't just human recovery required of the dedicated team. Ali was also burdened with demining bodies, sometimes those of ISIS fighters. I can tell straight away if they are ISIS crisis, they are usually booby trapped and often have foreign passports strapped to them.

We don't remove them. Our command after demining them is to leave them and authorities take those.

I stood alone as the last of the lives were swathed in those big black bags, their brains bursting through empty eye sockets.

I tore off my surgical mask, heaving at the smell of rotting corpses in the unbearable heat.

Iraq stood still at the fork between a potential future of death.

And one that would value life.

It was a place that resembled a fractured mosaic that could only be put back together by a young generation who knew little of life, not maimed by the brutality.

It was supposed to be a time after the war. It was supposed to be a time of peace.

Only. All it felt like was strange and sorrowful.

I thought about that tried and true expression we all tend to offer one another during hardships.

Everything happens for a reason.

No.

There was no reason these young men and women had to die alone, their bodies left to decay in the literal bowels of their country.

There was no great lesson to come from that, no sense in that they had completed their mission on earth, and no reason that it was their time to be taken by God.

That is the lie we tell ourselves.

A child from the neighborhood who had watched without flinching as the bodies were brought up peered over what was left of the bond that was fence.

He looked through the gaping hole into my tearful eyes.

Soon we stop crying for the dead, he whispered.

But all we can do is cry for the living.

That too.

Was war.

And that is.

It's not quite the closing of the book, but obviously it's the, it's the name of the book.

And like I said, we probably covered five. I probably read less than 5% of the book today. And these stories, I mean, every page, every story.

Just captures so much of this perspective that you are.

Trying to convey.

For me, you know, coming, coming home from my experiences.

For instance, my first deployment to Iraq, we spent a lot of time in Humvees. We were driving a lot. We were.

At that time the enemy would attack from bridges. So when you drive underneath a bridge, you'd sort of get like a little, you'd kind of go into a little bit of a standby mode, get that little, that little.

Heightened awareness, right? So when I got back to America, you're driving and as you know, around Baghdad, in much of Iraq, they look like highways. In California, you know, this is a big highway with signs. And it.

There was, you know, when I first got back, you'd start to feel. Or a vehicle would get close because you didn't want vehicles close to your Humvee convoy. So you'd see a vehicle coming close and for that split second you'd think, why is this guy getting close to me? Or you'd be approaching that bridge and get that little sensation of brace for it.

So you have these memories, I guess, that stick with you. And I've got a bunch of those different memories that stick with me.

Where are you at? What memories stick with you? Do you have trouble getting back to normal? Do you have trouble.

With going to sleep at night?

I think, you know, this was, this was a project I worked on a few years ago. And I think there has been a little bit of distance from it for me. I remember being in the middle of it and sort of, you know, when I was still writing and covering it, it was just, it was, it was an obsession to try to understand it, to get the story right, to get the facts right. And it was so all encompassing. And coming back, you know, it always took me a couple of weeks to kind of readjust. But one of the biggest sort of long lasting, I guess, impacts I always found, you know, in my experience was I think it was a sense of that feeling a little bit unsafe. But I would be in New York or la, I was living in both cities at the time, and.

You get a phishing scam or something on your phone that everybody gets. And for me, it was, oh, my God, I'm being targeted. Who wants something from me? And I always. I couldn't separate, you know, and think of it as, well, everybody gets these. For me, it just became this sort of. I was convinced everybody was tapping into my phone or. And for me, it was more of the. I couldn't see this sort of enemy, you know, and that took me a while to kind of let go of that a little bit and to be like, you know, you're okay. Nobody's. Nobody's coming at you now. Nobody's trying to hack into your emails. Nobody's trying to figure out who you're talking to on this particular day, or maybe they were. But, you know, it definitely was something I'd exaggerated, I think, in my head. So that's something I've had to have separation from. And I think that.

I've done that. But I still. I think about it a lot. I think about, you know, a lot of the people that I met and think, you know, I try to find out where they are, what they're doing. I think today with all these, you know, WhatsApp signal encrypted messaging, you stay in contact with these people a lot. And that's something that previous journalists in different generations didn't have. So today, which is lovely, you can still sort of stay in contact with them and their families and then. But it also is. Is that you do sort of feel helpless because there's not much you can do. And I dedicate this book to. It was a family that I stayed with in Syria, and they live in a place called Kobani. And it was sort of one of the big ISIS strongholds in the beginning, and they took me in. And you create these immediate bonds with people because, you know, they were my immediate sort of family. They had two young sons, and Masloom's wife, Parishion, was pregnant at the time. And they said, oh, when I left and we'd gone through all these, you know, experiences, and. And when I left, they said, oh, well, if she's a. If we have a daughter, we're going to name her Holly. And I just sort of smiled and I thought that was just really endearing and lovely. Sure enough, a few months later, I get a message and a picture that she had a girl, and they named her Holly, the same as me. That was funny. And I tried to sort of check in. I can't even send them a copy of the book. I can't send them, you know, anything. But I try to check in, you know, with them. And it was really sweet because they said, oh, there's about five Hollies in Kobani now. So it's kind of this funny little trend. And I was just so. I was so endeared by it. And I think it's those moments in life where you create bonds with people and they want nothing from you. They're not trying to get anything from you. They're not trying to have their name in a newspaper. They're not trying to do any of that. They just want to protect you. And it's such a rare thing in this day and age to have those relationships that.

Aren'T transactional in some way other than it just comes from a place that is so pure. And I think that's also why I was so attracted to the work, because you're really meeting people in their most authentic state. And I think that's just a huge thing I've tried to do in my life at home, too, is to really weed out what doesn't serve me as a human being and look for those authentic relationships. And that's one of the biggest takeaways for me in working in those war zones.

I remember when. When I got back from my last deployment and then I retired, and I, you know, would talk to guys and see stories about guys that would. That. Guys that were in Vietnam War and they'd go back to Vietnam. And then when I started doing the podcast, we met guys that had gone back to Vietnam. And I read more stories about guys that had gone back to Vietnam. And then, you know, you can take it to the. The guys that were in World War II that would go back to the beaches of Normandy. And. And I remember thinking to myself, as far as going back to Iraq, especially when I first got home, this is. I don't want to go back there. No. This. Don't want to go back there. No. I'm never going back there. Only recently have I started to feel. Think to myself, you know, it would be kind of cool to go back and walk those streets again.

Where are you at?

Oh, I was. I was planning to go back just before COVID lockdown. I had a visa to go, and then I was approached to even go, I think, like, in a couple of weeks to go. And I had to sort of turn it down because. For different reasons, but. Oh, yeah, in a heartbeat. I feel like Iraq is sort of just a. Yeah, it's kind of a second home, really. You know, it's been a little bit since I've been there, but I have nothing but sort of a desire to still go there. I don't view it as a place that I never want to go again.

Yeah, I'm slowly getting through that.

Maybe because I don't have.

A lot of things I don't really like my memories of it. A lot of them are great memories. That's what makes me start. You know, I used to say to the platoon guys, like, you're going through things while you're on deployment and you're mad about this and you're mad at that guy, and you're mad at this other guy. And I said, you know what? Two weeks after we get home, you're gonna forget all those bad stuff. Just remember the good stuff. And sure enough, as time goes by, you just remember the good stuff. So I think I'm getting there with. Specifically with the city of Ramadi. And it was really. I mean, obviously it was heart wrenching to see that when. When Ramadi got taken over by ISIS.

And the. The black flag of ISIS flying over the government center, which I know so many people had fought so hard to liberate that city, and it was doing so well.

And then it got smashed by isis. I remember there's pictures of. After the Iraqi soldiers went back in. They annihilated Ramadi. They blew up so many buildings. There was a neighborhood called Tamim in western, western Ramadi, and they. I saw pictures of it. It was just leveled, building after building after building, because they just. Every building that they thought might have a mind, they blew it up. And guess what they thought about. They all had IEDs, so they blew them all up. But, yeah, I think you have a much better relationship with the land and the people and the memories than I do.

Right. Yeah. And for me, it really is. It comes down to the people. It does. It's the people who.

I mean, what a privilege it is.

For these people to just. To trust you enough with some of these stories, to be that vulnerable with somebody that they don't know, you know, at least initially. And I think that's something I take as an honor, really, to be able to be some kind of vessel. Vessel in. In telling that. For me, you know, I hate to use the word voice when people say it's a voice of the voiceless. I know they have a voice, but. But I think as a journalist, you are some kind of vessel that can. Can bring that back and. And tell that and I can't do anything really beyond that. And I think that was also something I had to learn, was that you want to be able to think that a story is going to make a difference. It's going to change so and so, you know, some lawmaker's mind somewhere, and something's going to happen. And, you know, 99.9% of the time doesn't change anything, but doesn't make it any, you know, less important to do. And B, once you take that weight off your shoulders, it's so much easier to do your job because again, it's that clear mandate, you know, what it is that you're doing and everything else after that is out of your hands and not in the description.

Well, that's probably a great place to wrap this up, because what you've absolutely done in this book is you have told their stories, and we will pass these stories on to as many people as we can.

And I think like Heli Love said, you know, you've got what your talent is, right? You've got your skill in life, and Heli Love can make videos and sing, and you've got this ability to write and share these stories, and that's what you've done. So, Echo, you got anything?

No, that's it.

I know, Holly, that we can find you. Well, the book will be up on the website.

If you want to order the book on Twitter and on Instagram, you are Holly I. E. Is that a weird.

Spelling for Holly, I. E? I guess it's. It's slightly unusual. My mom was having a moment.

Holly S. McCann. McKay McKay on. And on Facebook, there's no S. Just Holly McKay. And you also have hollymckay.com yes.

So I put it up there. Yep.

So people can go there and check out what you're up to. What's your next project? What are you gonna do next?

So I'm working on a few different things, so I have a couple of writing projects that I am nodding out the basis on. It's. It's going to be quite a journey and I'm waiting for travel to open up, but I'm sort of looking a little bit more into the survival aspect of it. So. Yeah, so that'll be interesting. And I am, yeah, just kind of focused on that for now and sort of doing a lot more sort of geopolitical stuff as well. So it's kind of branching out.

Do you write? Do you. Are you writing news anymore on a regular basis?

I'm doing a little bit here and there But I'm really focused on my more long term projects right now. Kind of getting down a little bit more to the nitty gritty and the things that I really see as important as opposed to the daily churn. So I'm sort of taking a bit of a leap in that. So it's nice.

How was the book writing process? Did you like it?

You have always have a love hate with it, you know, but most of the time I really love it and I love being able to.

I hate being, having to decipher my handwriting out of a notebook. But beyond that I really love being able to kind of just sit and you sort of meditate on the details and I try to remember colors and faces and places and all those things and try to put it in, into words and so it can be challenging, definitely. And it can be definitely moments that I just, I don't want to get up and do it.

Did you take pictures?

I did, I took a lot of pictures.

So we need to get those up on the website.

Yeah, I'll get you pictures of whatever you need. So a lot of these, these people, they have, they have faces and places and.

Yeah, the. You wrote a novel?

I did when I was young.

And what's up with the novel? Where's it at?

I'm sure it's somewhere in Australia, probably in my dad's college. It was a, it was a sort of a young teen fiction novel. Yeah, we don't need to go into that.

I love to write. I was writing, you know, that was one thing aside from, from my ballet from a young age. I loved to tell those stories and always sort of loved to write and make up weird and wonderful things and. Yeah.

Awesome, awesome. Anything else? Do you got anything else here?

So I just. Yeah, thank you for having me here. And you know, it's obviously these things don't happen in isolation. So. I have a wonderful family back home in Australia. My parents have always been amazing support my sister and my nieces and, and then my, I call them my American family, which is really my, you know, close knit group of friends that I have in different pockets of America that have really been such a backbone of support for me. I had one good friend, Miley Cardenas, who's a veteran and she came on a few trips with me and was amazing. And another good friend of mine, Dennis Santiago, who helped me with the editing. So yeah, they're really my family in the US and then my, my family in Australia.

Well, it's all come together for, I mean, I think it's very clear that this is a powerful book. And I thank you for coming on here. I thank you for letting Jocko Publishing put it out along with d' Angelo Publishing, our friend Sequoia. So that's awesome. And it's an honor for me to be able to help get this book out there to the world and get these stories shared.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

And.

Look, I hope I didn't come off as crazy or arrogant or like a jerk when I was talking about the fact that we do some crazy stuff when we're young and there's a certain amount of being naive. But I don't care how naive you are or how naive you were for you to go into these places to capture these stories and I didn't. There's. There's plenty of stories in there where I know from being in combat myself how close you were to the front lines, how close you. How much danger you were in all the time. So thank you for writing the book, but also thank you for your courage and your bravery to go out there, take these risks, to capture these stories, to capture the horrors of war, so that hopefully we as a race of people in the world can learn to avoid it at all costs.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Holly.

Thank you. Thank you both.

And with that, Holly has left the building and left us with an incredible book with some incredible accounts in it. So.

Definitely check out that book. A lot of horror in that book.

A lot of horror in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. Ho. Like, like she'll describe each detail and it goes along with kind of what we've been saying a lot where it's like. Yeah. When you just individualize one thing and see their story, it's like, oh man. It really opens up this perspective of like, man, this is bad.

Yep. Yeah. And by the way, this is 430something page book, you know, and I probably read 20 pages, something like that. So it's an awesome book. And yeah, check it out. A lot of horror. A lot of horror in the book. A lot of horror in the world.

I kind of feel like we should do our best.

To bring some good in the world, starting with our own lives.

Yes.

Try and live a good life.

Good life. Yeah.

Start there.

Yeah. Kind of be appreciative too, you know?

Oh, yeah, I didn't bring it up. Holly just, you know, living on the floor of some random blown out building. She's getting after it, man. She getting after it. She doesn't. She talks about it, but it's not. That's what I. It's very humbly written story because it's not about her.

Yeah, yeah, that's good.

It's not about her. It's about the people. And so with that, it's. Yeah, yeah. Very cool.

Yeah, that says kind of a lot too about an author when they don't make it about themselves. Because you could, she could.

Oh, this could. 100%. This could be a book about her. Yeah, 100%. I went here and I did this and I did that. It's not that. That's not what the book is.

I thought, thought my life about to be over.

In fact, I had to drag it out of her. I had to drag out of her where she came from and how it started and how she got there. She just jumps right into it. And what you just said about. I was here and I was there. She'll be talking about it and I can tell what she means. But a lot of people, it's going to. She said, you know, their explosion happened here. But you know what I'm. I'm thinking, okay, I know what's happening there. There's gunfire going on. That's not. She just kind of puts it under the rate. Under the radar, kind of. Her MO is to be under the radar. So.

Yeah.

So yeah, yeah, we do have to be appreciative for sure. We're like, even at, like, even if you're not involved in the war in these places. Even though, I guess be appreciative of that.

Yeah.

Because like your day to day life here versus day to day life there. Even best case scenarios brought different.

Your worst case, your worst day here is better than your best day there for 99% of the population, if not more.

Oh, yeah. So yeah, man, make the best of it. It's one of those deals.

Right?

Anyway.

All right, so yes, let's not let our lives and capabilities go to waste in any way. Let's try not to. How about that? Intention is a big deal, you know, it is just knowing these things, that's a, that's a huge start. You know, like GI Joe. Remember GI Joe? What they'd say, knowing is half the battle.

Did GI Joe actually say that? I thought that was Sun Tzu in 25, 2500 years ago.

No, GI Joe, man.

That's probably what the concept is. Clear.

Yes, sir.

So the GI Joe.

Yeah. So you got to keep these things in mind. Did you work out today? If you're like, oh, wait, did I work out? You got to know this kind of stuff and you Got to know whether or not you're working out tomorrow. See what I'm saying? Working out is important.

Definitely. And yes, I did work out today.

Yes, sir. You work out every day, right? Seven days.

Like that's, that's the, that's the thing.

The jam. Yeah, I recently incorporated that into my whole thing. Usually I'd have a five day and then to rest day situation.

Two rest days.

Yes, sir.

Back to back.

Yes, sir. Like, usually the weekend. Because my program goes five days at a time, like week by week. And that's just how it is convenient. And it is convenient. But it had. That was it even before. Even before I was like, oh, I need rest days or nothing like that. Or had less when I had less going on is what I'm saying. So that was the, the structured program. But I found that if you sort of spread it out a little bit more. And I try to go hard too, on every single day. Like hard at least one thing hard. You know, some people, they'll be like, oh, yeah, seven days. But like this one or two days. Like it's like a mobility day or whatever.

Well, I might have. Depending on how I feel, I can. I can tell when I've beat myself down to where I need a, quote, mobility day, for sure.

Oh, yeah.

I'll usually still try and break a sweat.

Yeah.

Like just at a minimum. Just, you know, at a minimum, I'm gonna break a sweat.

Yeah. See, and that. And you know, there's. There's a bunch of different effective philosophies in working out and working out programs. So I get. I'm not saying, oh, yours I know to be as good as mine. I'm not saying that at all. But I found. And currently what I'm currently on is the. To do something hard. Like hard where your body has to be like, hey, we got to recover from this. Whether it be like a one small body part situation, even like a metcon situation like that. Just at least one thing. I like that on these kind of one off days, a normal workout day is hard. It's gonna be a hard one.

Oh, you're saying on the easier day, you're still gonna do one thing. Hard, Hard. Yeah, I like it. I actually do a very similar version of that. Not consciously, but unconsciously.

Yeah.

So let's say I'm going a little bit. Let's say I'm not going super hard, metcon style. But I'm gonna probably go heavy or if I'm going heavy or if I'm not really like feeling The Metcon. I'll go heavy somewhere.

Yeah.

So I guess we're kind of of.

In the same boat there. Yeah, it keeps your body there trying to, you know, trying to adapt. Adapt and get, you know, kind of re rebuild itself as the new and improved version. Anyway, so hopefully we can kind of take this philosophy and apply it to our whole life.

Hopefully.

See what I'm saying? But here's a, here's the thing. Keep in mind we might need some supplementation from time to time. You don't get, you don't get.

Dying out hours of sleep every single night. You know, you don't, you don't max maximally nine hours.

Everybody's different. So you don't, you don't recover max. You don't maximize your recovery every single day.

Okay.

Every once in a while you need some supplementation.

For sure. You need supplementation and in fact you.

Got a little supplementation routine. Boom. You're going to be on the track even quicker, faster, more effectively. No worries. Jocko has some supplementation. Jocko fuel. So here it is. You need protein supplementation.

Got milk.

Tastes like a dessert. By the way, I've been on that train for about almost a month now. I forgot, I forgot the joy, the glory. So actually going rewind just a little bit. So all this stuff, you can be on a subscription. Yeah, we mentioned it before. But the subscription you will not have to pay shipping.

Right.

You will not have to remember to take these less fun ones to take. And I mean less fun. Like they're like anti fun. I'm just saying the difference between taking a milkshake, drinking a milkshake and taking joint warfare or super krill oil, like one has like a pleasurable experience. One is kind of like, okay, you just sort of do it.

One's prolonged pleasure when you don't have joint pain.

Yeah, but that's the delayed, that's the delay gratification. I'm just saying if you forget like it's a little bit more. Can be more of a thing anyway, check you got a subscription. You don't have to even think about that kind of stuff. Also do you get a, like a discount or something? You get a discount?

Yep. Little 10 discount. Boom. So you subscribe.

Yeah, yeah.

And free shipping. So that you combine those two things together, we're in a good spot.

Oh yeah.

So it's kind of a win. Win.

Yeah. It's a no brainer if you're like, if you're taking it consistently, which you should be, trust me. The difference between Even that taking it and not taking it consistently night and day, man. So if you're doing it, it's a win, win, win, really.

Triple win, triple win coming. So jockofuel.com you can get your supplementation there, which you apparently do need. You do need. And if you subscribe to it, you get shipping free and you get 10 off, which is cool. You can also get the drinks, the go drinks at Wawa. You can get all the supplements at Vitamin Shop. So there you go. Or jockofuel.com Yep. Do what you want to do. Do what you do. You see something. If you like something, get something.

Get something.

Yeah.

Also@originmain.com.

Boots, jeans, geese.

All American made, by the way.

All American made.

Yeah.

All meaning all of them and all meaning the entire product itself is all American made.

Do you, do you. Can you. And I don't expect you to answer this question, but I wonder if you can find something that's not American made in the whole chain. Like if you go to one of the looms that they got, could you find like a set of screws that are used in there? You're like, hey, those are made in, you know, somewhere else you are going.

To be hard pressed to find something in your jeans that is not 100% American made.

Crazy.

In fact, the jeans, I can tell you there's nothing that's not American made.

Yeah.

The clothing, 100% American made. I mean, and not only is it 100% American made, we know where it came from. We know where the, the hide is that we're getting the leather from. We know where that is.

Yeah. It goes deep.

So yeah, American made. Bunch of awesome stuff by a bunch of. All made by a bunch of awesome people in Farmington, Maine.

Yeah, sorry, Origin USA.com. sorry, I said origin Maine. I'm sure you can still go to origin Maine.

You can't. But let's face it, OriginUSA.com's a little bit stronger.

We'll say stronger.

Yes. Not the main's not strong. But look, who would you rather fight a war against, Maine or America? You know what I'm saying? Including Maine, by the way, which includes Maine. Right. So I think we'll go with, we'll go with origin usa.

I agree.

So yes, also Jocko has a store as well. Jocko store.com. this is where you can get your discipline equals freedom. Shirts and hats and hoodies. Good. All kinds of cool stuff on there.

You get the shirt I'm wearing right now?

Yeah.

You can get the jacket that you're wearing. Is that called a jacket?

Lightweight hoodie.

You can get a lightweight hoodie that Echo Charles is wearing right now.

It's lightweight hoodie weather. You're over here taking on and off your hoodie, which I dig. Do what you do.

It's just off.

Currently it is.

Because I'm warm enough.

You showed. You showed up with it on. You see what I'm saying?

It's cool outside.

I showed up with mine on. Fine. Came in here fine. You see what I'm saying, though?

So all I'm going to tell you is that in the middle of the bell curve, you're good. If we go outside the bell curve in either direction, you're out of. You're out of luck. So if it gets a little colder, you're screwed. And if it gets more hot, you're screwed.

Yeah, that's true.

So guess it looks like I'm right.

I like the aesthetic value that this lightweight hood brings.

You like to look a certain way.

Some of us.

Some of us like this kind of stuff.

Some of us are just over here trying to win. Nonetheless worried about how we look.

Nonetheless.

These things are available for those of us who appreciate it. Speaking of appreciation, if you can appreciate, let's say one off designs or concepts, we call them layers from time to time on our apparel that we choose to wear because it looks good and feels good. We have a little subscription situation as well. So it's the Shirt Locker. We've landed on that name with the help of Jocko's creativity.

No, no, that was not my creativity. That was a suggestion from Trooper. Trooper put. I got your name. The Shirt Locker. Because the name. Which I will not mention because I don't want to hear it.

Yes, sir.

That Echo Charles lack of creativity.

Yes, sir. Okay.

Got us to. That's the name that will not be spoken. Shall not be spoken. Because now we got something good. The Shirt Locker.

Shirt Locker. So that is a monthly thing. You get a new. A new design. They're cool. They're. They're. There's some layers. There's a attention and focus on the layers. So if you listen, you know, and.

You'Re gonna fancy for you to be able to.

It kind of is. Yes, sir. But yes. Yeah, check that out. And if that seems cool, hey, that might. That. That one might be for you as well. Jockostore.com. that's where you can get those.

Subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review if you want to. We also got other podcasts. We got the Jocko Unraveling podcast. Which Darrell Cooper is in the house. We should be rolling out with some of those grounded podcasts again. Working it. Working it. And the Warrior Kid podcast. Working it. I have some time coming up, so we should get some of those done. You can also join us at the Jocko underground.com Jocko underground.com we have alternative podcasts with some amplifying information, some other subject matter, some behind the scenes. We got some Q A that we're working on where you can send in your audio, voice, video thing, and we'll put all that together.

Also, the underground, what I kind of notice when I listen to them and stuff, these are like, like, I mean, I think it all. Even the jock podcast, of course, like, makes your brain, like, think and work and stuff, but it's like I find myself, like, doing little brain. It's like exercise for your brain almost. You know, you start to think about stuff like, oh, wait, do I do that? Oh, wait, does that apply to me?

Yeah. I would tell you that the subject matter in the Jocko Underground podcasts are based on me going through daily life and recognizing the patterns and the maneuvers and the thoughts and the. And the curiosity and, hey, wait, why do it? Why. Why did that happen? Why do we do that? And sometimes it doesn't fit into a Jocko podcast because it's some. Something about psychology or something about negotiate, whatever, and so. But it's very important. And does it. It's like a Venn diagram. Is there some part of it that's leadership? Yes, there's a. Some kind of. That's history. Yes, there's some psychology, some social. It's all mixed in there. But what it is, it's all subject matter that will help you. Helps me. It helps me, but it's me digging into and revealing why these things are happening. Why am I doing these things? Sometimes my instincts are good, sometimes they're not good, but either way, I'm going to learn from it. And it's just the approach that I take in life to try and figure something out. Because like Jiu Jitsu, you know, when you train jiu jitsu and someone goes, oh, put your arm here, and you're like, okay. But then the next day, you don't really remember that. But if someone says, put your. Put your arm here and here's why you do it, and you start to understand the concept. So I think that's a big part of the Jocko Underground podcast is what's the concept behind what's happening here?

What makes it like Jiu Jitsu? Obviously a great analogy where like there's certain things, things in Jiu Jitsu and subsequently in life or your day to day, whatever, that certain things are not intuitive. In fact they're counter, counter like, you know, in Jiu Jitsu to turn your back right into like a full. Like there's so many reasons in regular life to like turn your back. That's the best move. It feels like it from moment to moment. Like if someone's mounted on you, like turning your back. If you never trained Jiu jitsu, it's, it's weird.

Basically I want to get away. How do you get away? Turn your back and run away. Right. Well, you can't run anymore because you're on the ground.

Yeah. Like if you're mounting, you try to stand up. The most powerful way you can stand up is to turn over and stand up with him on your back. You can't do a sit up with someone, you know. So it's like there's all these intuitive things that are incorrect that is going to make you lose. And then in like it's the same thing with like a lot of those, whether it be the cognitive biases or whatever, it's kind of the same thing. And yeah, that's real interesting how you kind of explore them and you're like.

Oh man, shoot for this. And then you know what to do and what not to do.

You.

So that's the Jocko underground dot com. If you want to, if you want to come and check that out. Look, it's, it's also us, our way of having a contingency plan in case things get wild. In case, and there's a bunch of things that could happen. Look, we could get censored for something that some subject matter that we cover. We could get, people could start to say, okay, well now you're gonna, we're gonna put inject advertisements into your podcast. We don't want that. We, we just want to have a long advertisement at the end that echo talks for 48 minutes on. But we don't want that. So that's what we're doing. We don't, we don't want to be held hostage by a platform or held hostage by sponsors. And so $8.18 a month. If you want, you can, you can join the Jocko underground.com and, and if you can't afford that, look, we're not.

We'Re not trying to be elite. So if you can't afford it, no factor email assistanceaco underground.com and we will take care of You. We also have a YouTube channel where you can check out Echo Charles's legit videos.

Where I on the good ones, I'm the assistant director. On the bad ones, he kind of goes solo rogue, so you can check those out. Lots of explosions. We have an album with tracks called Psychological Warfare. You can listen to that. If you have a momentary.

Just a. Just a. Just a temptation that you need to overcome. It's okay. Hit play. Psychological warfare on your MP3 platforms. Flipside Canvas, DakotaMyer, flipsidecanvas.com, cool stuff to hang on your wall. We have a bunch of books, Only Cry for For the living by Holly McKay. There you go. Check that one out. Final Spin, a novel written by me. We don't even know if it's a novel. I don't know if it's a novel. I don't know if it's a poem. I don't know if it's just. I don't know what it is, but we'll see. I've been getting warnings people are going to critique you. I'm like, what are they going to say to me? Your book sucks. Cool. Thank you. Carry on.

Good critique.

Thanks. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. The code, the evaluations, protocols. Discipline equals freedom. Field manual. Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3 and 4. Get those for any kids that you know. Mikey and the Dragons. Get those for the little kids that you know about. Face by Hackworth. Extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. Echelon Front is my leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. If you need help with leadership in your organization, go to echelonfront.com we have EF Online, which is leadership training online, which means you can get it for everybody that you know, everyone inside your organization, and whatever problems you're having inside your organization, the problems get solved through leadership, as I just said. Well, there's nothing better than getting everyone on your team aligned around the same principles of leadership. It's. It's insane to think you would even try and run an organization without having everyone aligned around the same principles of leadership. So go to efonline.com and start taking some courses, go through the program, come and do Q&As.

We have a live gig that we do. We're doing three of them this year. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to come to those EF Overwatch. If you need people inside your company.

To help you with your leadership that you want to hire, go to efoverwatch.com and if you want to help service members active and retired. You want to help their family? You want to help gold star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org and if you want to continue this conversation, we're on the interwebs. Once again, Holly is on Twitter and on Instagram. Holly S. McKay. It's H O L L I E S McKay Mc K A Y and she's on Facebook. Holly McKay. And she also has Holly McKay.com and of course Echo and I are also on the interwebs on Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the gram and Facebook Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willing. Thanks once again to Holly McKay for taking risk, for showing courage and for capturing these stories to share with all of us. And thanks to all the military personnel out there all over the world who stand and face evil like ISIS every day. Thank you for keeping that evil at bay. And right here at home, all the police and law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all first responders, thank you for keeping us safe on the home front and everyone else out there.

You heard it today. There is a lot of evil in the world. It's everywhere.

And it's up to all of us to fight against it. That doesn't mean you, you have to pick up a gun, doesn't mean you have to pick up a weapon, doesn't mean you have to go overseas.

But you have to fight it.

And we have to make sure we keep it at bay by making sure we never forget that it's there. And then what we need to do is go out every day.

And do good.

And bring light into the world.

And until next time, this is Echo Ninjako out.