November 6, 2017 Issue

What was it like to be in Raqqa this summer during the fight to expel ISIS? Luke Mogelson’s extraordinary “Dark Victory,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after gritty detail. It puts us on the ground, near the front lines, with the Syrian Democratic Forces, amid the city’s bombed-out ruins:

Inside the city, the devastation was apocalyptic. Block after block of tall apartment towers had been obliterated. Every building seemed to have been struck by ordnance: either destroyed entirely, scorched black by fire, or in a state of mid-collapse, with slabs of concrete hanging precariously from exposed rebar and twisted I-beams. Bulldozers had plowed a path through heaps of cinder blocks, felled power poles, and other detritus. Up ahead, missiles hit: a whistle, then a crash, then a dark plume. Smoke and dust roiled over rooftops.

“Dark Victory” is riveting, and what makes it riveting (for me, at least) is Mogelson’s masterful use of “I,” which gives his reports the immediacy and authenticity of personal experience. Examples:

In August, in the living room of an abandoned house on the western outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, I met with Rojda Felat, one of four Kurdish commanders overseeing the campaign to wrest the city from the Islamic State, or ISIS.

One afternoon this summer, near a front line in West Raqqa, I sat in a requisitioned residence with Ali Sher, a thirty-three-year-old Kurdish commander with a handlebar mustache and the traditional Y.P.G. uniform: camouflage, Hammer pants and a colorful head scarf tied back pirate-style.

A few days after speaking with Ali Sher in West Raqqa, my translator and I followed two pickup trucks, crowded with about twenty Arab fighters, through the southern fringes of the city.

Another afternoon, on a street in East Raqqa, where the S.D.F. had pushed into the city’s old quarter, breaching a huge mud-mortar wall from the eighth century, I watched an armored bulldozer return from clearing some rubble nearby.

In another bedroom of the house, I found the ranking commander for the area, a Kurd, sitting on a box spring beneath a shattered window that overlooked the hospital.

These wonderful first-person sentences report war as lived experience. I devour them.  

The Mauricio Lima photos illustrating “Dark Victory” (especially the newyorker.com version) are transfixing, among the best to appear in the magazine in recent memory.

Photo by Mauricio Lima

“Dark Victory” is Mogelson’s third piece on the war against ISIS. The others are “The Front Lines” (The New Yorker, January 18, 2016) and “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017). Together they make one of the most brilliant series of war reports The New Yorker has ever published. I hope Mogelson collects them in a book. It would be an instant classic.

Postscript: Five inspired lines from this week’s New Yorker:

1. “Over here—put in potato—close—strong,” a centenarian named Anastasia instructed, pinching dumplings shut with practiced rhythm. – David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Streecha”

2. Three drinks in, a teetering twentysomething left most of his Up and Cumming—a frothy high-proof pineapple margarita—spilled on the bar. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

3. The muralist packed up, leaving a half-painted Liza Minnelli to gaze out, smirking, on the besotted crowd. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

4. The penumbral horse that Georges Seurat let loose with his black Conté crayon in 1882, on view here, might be up for a wild ride with Black Hawk’s “Buffalo Dreamers.” – Andrea K. Scott, “Paper Weight”

5. The cinematographer William Lubtchansky’s grainy black-and-white images have the feel of cold stone, and, when the pragmatic Lilie challenges François to get on with his life, the chill of hard reality is all the more brutal. – Richard Brody, “Movies: Regular Lovers”