#42, Battle of Mosul: The Brutal Nine-Month Siege to Crush the Islamic State
The Battle of Mosul from October 2016 to July 2017 killed an estimated 40,000 people, the bloodiest urban battle of the 21st century. Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, and Shia militia units backed by a U.S.-led coalition of 60 nations fought to liberate Iraq's second-largest city from the Islamic State, which had held it since June 2014 and transformed it into the de facto capital of their self-declared caliphate.
The eastern half fell relatively quickly, but western Mosul, with its narrow Old City streets too tight for armored vehicles, became a meat grinder. ISIS fighters used over 800 vehicle-borne IEDs as rolling car bombs, rigged entire neighborhoods with explosives, and used tens of thousands of civilians as human shields. Coalition airstrikes leveled entire city blocks. The Al-Nuri Mosque, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate in 2014, was destroyed by ISIS during the final days. Nine months of grinding urban combat reduced western Mosul to rubble and displaced over 900,000 civilians, but it broke the Islamic State's territorial hold on Iraq and signaled the beginning of the end for their physical caliphate.
