“The battle for west Mosul has caused a civilian catastrophe,” opened an Amnesty International report in 2017, as Western-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces battled the soldiers of jihad. “Civilians have been ruthlessly exploited by the armed group calling itself the Islamic State, which has systematically moved them into zones of conflict, used them as human shields and prevented them from escaping to safety.
“They have also been subjected to relentless and unlawful attacks by Iraqi government forces and members of the US-led coalition. Residents of west Mosul count themselves lucky if they escape with their lives.”
At the time, the RAF and US Air Force were providing air support while local troops undertook the fighting on the ground. But some American special forces troops were embedded as spotters with the Iraqi army, responsible for calling in air strikes on enemy targets.
I met a veteran from this campaign recently. He described how he would be stationed just behind the frontlines, waiting for information about Islamic State positions. From time to time, Iraqi soldiers would inform him that a jihadi sniper was firing from this or that building.
Without hesitation, he would call in an airstrike. Within minutes, a 2,000lb bomb would fall. No more sniper. No more buildings, either; no more civilians inside. In his estimation, he told me, about 60 non-combatants had at times been killed for every terrorist.
“Islamic State tactics and violations created particular challenges for pro-government forces in terms of civilian protection in west Mosul,” the Amnesty report observed. “Iraqi government and US-led coalition forces failed to adequately adapt their tactics to these challenges – as required by international humanitarian law – with disastrous consequences for civilians.”
It went on to accuse coalition forces of “a series of unlawful attacks” using “explosive weapons with wide area effects” that had “crude targeting abilities”. As a result, “these weapons wreaked havoc in densely populated west Mosul, where large groups of civilians were trapped in homes or makeshift shelters,” it said. By some estimates, by the end of the battle, up to 40,000 civilians had been killed.
At the time, the key findings were handed both to the Iraqi defence minister, Irfan al-Hayali, and to the American secretary of defence, James Mattis, in an attempt to stop the massacre of the innocent. Yet this was in the aftermath of the Bataclan attack in Paris, the Brussels bombings, the Nice truck massacre and the Berlin Christmas market ramming, all of which had been perpetrated by Islamic State. Our blood was up. The campaign continued until the battle was won.
Which brings me to the present. In the Times this week, Matthew Parris wrote a column under the headline “Why are we closing our eyes to Gaza’s horror?” It contained an impassioned plea for all people of conscience to speak with one voice and implore Israel to stop the war on Hamas. Mainly, his arguments revolved around a desire to simply see the suffering stop. “What further savagery must be inflicted before we, Israel’s western allies, say ‘enough’ — and mean it?” he asked.
Israel, he added, did not need to defend itself with such “utter ruthlessness” because its feeling of standing “alone in the world” was a fiction. “Israel has always relied, and relies now, on outside help and sympathy,” he argued, citing shipments of arms and diplomatic support. This, he added, was provided due to Western guilt over the Holocaust. “Victimhood has been a formidable weapon in the Israeli armoury,” he wrote.
Parris can keep his victimhood. But his column raises a number of questions. The campaign in Mosul, in which Britain took part, did not take place in response to an act of savagery on our own soil on a scale comparable to October 7. But the acts of terror that were suffered by Britain and Europe were bad enough.
All the attacks I mentioned above, from the Bataclan atrocities to Brussels, Nice and Berlin, I saw with my own eyes as a foreign reporter. There were many more. I was on the ground hours after the murder of five people in a truck ramming in Stockholm, and the shooting of 39 revellers in a night club in Istanbul, and the butchery in London and Manchester, and even the Easter bombings in Colombo, which were particularly gruesome for reasons I care not to recall.
I have lost count of the times I saw fresh blood on pavements and inside smashed-up cafés surrounded by police cordons. On many occasions, I have spoken to traumatised witnesses, and run in fear of secondary explosions, and approached houses with drawn curtains to knock on the doors of the bereaved.
Islamic State had to be destroyed. We knew it. And as anybody who has visited the appalling killing fields in southern Israel can attest, Hamas must be destroyed too.
In Parris’ column, he quotes “that most Judaic of Jesus’s thoughts: ‘It needs must be that offences come, but woe unto that man through whom they come’.” Perhaps there is some truth in that. In return, however, may I introduce him to an essential piece of Talmudic hermeneutical methodology that was drummed into us at school: “kal v’chomer”. It roughly translates as “all the more so”.
Here's an example. If there was a moral imperative for the coalition to destroy Islamic State in Mosul in 2017, kal v’chomer, there is a moral imperative for Israel to destroy Hamas now. See how it works? The real question isn’t why anybody is “closing their eyes to Gaza’s horror”. The real question is why people have forgotten the horrors of the conflicts in which our own troops were involved.
