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Five coalition servicemen died this past week in Iraq. Capt. Moises Navas and Gunnery Sgt. Diego Pongo, both Marines, were killed in northern Iraq by Islamic State fighters, while a few days later, Army Spc. Juan Covarrubias, Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal Roberts and British medic Lance Cpl. Brodie Gillon died in a rocket attack launched by a Shia militia group.

If media attention hadnt been fixated on Covid-19, their deaths might have raised the question of what the United States is still doing in Iraq. Its a fair question. The Islamic States physical caliphate is no more, and in the wake of assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iraqi parliament recently voted to expel U.S. forces. Now, with Iranian-backed militia groups targeting U.S. troops, its probably a good time for the administration to assess its policy objectives in Iraq.

To be clear, this isnt going to be diatribe against military involvement overseas. I have, over the course of a 31-year career, seen my share of wasted effort and lives in pursuit of incoherent policy objectives, but am not of the view that the U.S. can simply retreat behind its borders and expect its national interests to take care of themselves. And there is good reason for continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq: to pre-empt a resurgence of the Islamic State a threat which, as this recent incident illustrates, has not gone away and as a check on the malign influence of Iran. The 5,000 U.S. troops currently there might be a relatively small price to pay to achieve those goals, if that is indeed the plan. But at a time when the United States finds itself again at a decision point in Iraq, I am concerned that once again there are no clear policy objectives to guide U.S. military involvement.

I have, like many of my contemporaries in the military, some personal involvement in Iraqs troubled recent history most recently as the commander of the coalition special operations task force given the mission of defeating the Islamic State which had, by the beginning of 2016, reached a point only 30 miles from Baghdad. During the ensuing campaign which ultimately enabled the Iraqi security forces to re-take Mosul and effectively expel ISIS from Iraq, we in the task force were compelled to adhere to an uneasy truce with the various Iranian-backed Shia militia groups that fought alongside the Iraqi Army against the common foe.

In my subsequent billet as chief of staff at Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT), it became clear that Iran would emerge from the counter-ISIS campaign in a position of strength in Iraq. And with ISIS now defeated, it seemed only a matter of time before Iranian-backed militia groups turned on U.S. forces. As SOCCENT planners prepared for this eventuality while working on a wider plan to counter Irans malign influence in the region, it became apparent that one person was holding the militia back from attacking U.S. personnel. And that person was one Qassem Soleimani. Why the nemesis of U.S. interests in the region should in this instance, oppose the spilling of American blood, we could only speculate. The reason, we supposed, was that Soleimani was, in the end, a pragmatist he would have to have been to have survived as long as he did. And for those like him, accustomed to operating in what U.S. national security pundits like to call the Gray Zone, there are certain boundaries implicitly acknowledged by both sides to avoid all-out conflict.

When, several months after my retirement, I heard of Soleimanis death, I assumed that those who planned it understood these rules, and that the decision to break them was taken deliberately, with a plan to mitigate the inevitable repercussions for doing so. Now Im not so sure. That Kataib Hezbollah a virulently pro-Iranian militia would respond by launching rockets at coalition personnel was an entirely predictable response.

Nevertheless, killing Soleimani might still have made sense if it was part of an overarching plan, but the evidence so far indicates that there is no such plan beyond a willingness by the United States to trade blows. And Soleimanis death, in addition to provoking attacks of the kind that just took place, will make Iran only more determined to influence the Iraqi government to expel U.S. forces from the country once again. And that worries me, because I was hoping that after years of involvement in that troubled country, the U.S. had learned from its mistakes.

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Seventeen years ago this month, the U.S. invaded Iraq, beginning a chain of events that even now has yet to run its course. I played a small role in that operation as a planner with 7th Marine Regiment, and remember vividly the sense of anticipation as we rumbled through the border town of Safwan in the gray light of early dawn, part of a vast armored column that stretched for as for as the eye could see while the horizon ahead flashed and rumbled. On that first day, the only sign of resistance came from a stray dog who emerged from the abandoned border post to bark at us furiously, as though a harbinger of things to come.

Some three weeks later, on the day that Baghdad fell, I found myself in Firdous square surrounded by hundreds of Iraqis who swarmed around the giant statue of Saddam Hussein at its center in scenes of riotous celebration. As the statue toppled, the crowd danced and bayed their delight. It was a moment of pure euphoria, the likes of which I had never seen before nor since.

That mood swiftly evaporated, giving way instead to resentment towards the occupiers as a rapidly declining security situation was fueled by a series of rash decisions by the coalition provincial authority. These included the now infamous de-Baathication edict which ensured that the burgeoning insurgency would have no shortage of recruits armed, trained and angry.

I returned to Iraq several times over the course of the following years. First as an adviser to the nascent Iraqi Army, during which tour I participated in the Battle of Fallujah and subsequent operations in Mosul, providing security for the countrys first democratic elections. Then as an infantry battalion commander to the worst part of notorious Anbar province, a town called with unwitting irony, Karma where the U.S. commander who preceded me was killed by a suicide bomb days before our turnover. I experienced at first hand, the peaks and troughs of the war from post-liberation euphoria, through the disillusionment and the vertiginous slide into mayhem that followed, to the period of optimism that came in the aftermath of the dramatic increase in troop levels known as the surge.

It was during that period beginning in 2009 that it really seemed possible that Iraq might transition into a peaceful democratic society. As the number of violent incidents plummeted, the U.S. military turned over the reins of security to Iraqi security forces and took a back seat. But these milestones of the military campaign were not matched by a sense of political progression, by an understanding that this hard-won reprieve would last only if each segment of Iraqi society Sunni, Shia and Kurd were given representation in the new government. There was a brief window of opportunity when a determined U.S. diplomatic and political effort might have curbed the excesses of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an avowedly Shia politician who rose to power in the U.S.-backed elections of December 2005 and over the course of the next four years steadily consolidated his position. Instead, by the time that Iraqis took responsibility for security, and Maliki announced that he had no further need for U.S. troops, the U.S. government had lost all leverage. And, in the halcyon early days of the Obama administration, it seemed a good time to turn away from a wasteful war.

After the last U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, Maliki, at the head of the hardline Shia Dawa party, embarked on an agenda that was blatantly sectarian, arresting tribal leaders without reason, and edging out Sunni politicians, to include his deputy prime minister, a Sunni, whom he sentenced to death in absentia. When, in 2013, Sunni tribes in Anbar protested their disenfranchisement, Maliki dispatched his Shia-dominated security forces to quell the disturbance, a task they performed with zealous brutality, killing scores, and leaving in their wake a sense of helpless rage. The stage was set for the subsequent rise of the ISIS in Iraq who seemed to offer the Sunni population, now excluded from the political process, their only recourse.

By the summer of 2014, the stream of Islamic State conquests in Iraq was a gut-wrenching litany of places whose names evoked for so many Marines and soldiers memories of bloodshed and suffering: Tal Afar, Mosul, Al Qaim, Haditha, Fallujah, Karma. When I returned to Iraq as head of the special operations task force, I felt for the first time during that war that military and policy objectives were aligned and made sense.

Now four years later the Islamic States physical caliphate is gone, but the grievances that fueled its rise are still there as I was reminded recently in an email from an Iraqi journalist friend.

It has been more than 40 days and Iraqis continue demonstrating against their corrupt government. More than 300 of them have been killed, and 15,000 injured. The main power supporting the government is a political block led by Hadi Al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr organization and one of Irans main allies. Everyone is asking what is the American stand on this? Is the U.S. just going to watch this?

My friends plaintiff question is a reminder that the United States will never be able to meet the expectations of the few friends it has left in that country. But there is good reason for the U.S. to retain some military presence there: to help train the Iraqi security forces, thus making them more professional and less susceptible to sectarian influence and to assist the Iraqi government in their counter-terrorism efforts. But this time, the administration will need to combine military and economic assistance with a concerted diplomatic effort to prevent a repetition of the Maliki era, when sectarian interests dominated the Iraqi government and gave rise to ISIS.

So many unintended consequences were unleashed that day that our armored columns sped across the border at Safwan opposed only by the forlorn barking of a stray dog. Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later it does appear, as my friend indicates, that Iran has been the only real winner, and will continue to consolidate power unless the United States implements a clearly defined policy to retain presence and influence. Its not so much a question of what the United States can hope to gain by continued involvement, as it is about what it stands to lose by a precipitous withdrawal. And to that, recent history bears sobering testament.

Andrew Milburn is a former Marine colonel who retired in March 2019 as the chief of staff of Special Operations Command Central. He has commanded Marine and special operations units in combat at every rank over the course of a 31-year career, and is the author of When the Tempest Gathers: From Mogadishu to the fight against ISIS, a Marine Special Operations Commander at War.

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The Iraq War is not yet over - Military Times

70th Berlin International Film FestivalPart 3CurveballGermanys role in the Iraq warand the horrors of the concentration camp in Persian Lessons By Stefan Steinberg 18 March 2020

This is the third in a series of articles on the Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, which recently took place February 20March 1. Part 1 was posted on February 28 and Part 2 on March 11.

Curveball by German director Johannes Naber valuably turns a knife in a wound that many in the American and German intelligence communities and governments no doubt hoped had long since healedthe way in which the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on entirely fraudulent and lying justifications.

Naber has made a number of notable films, including the immigrant drama The Albanian (2009), Age of Cannibals (2013) and Heart of Stone(2019).

At the premiere of Curveball in Berlin, a festival representative introduced the film, but said he could not read out its title. The film festival lists it merely as Untitled. The films name is currently the subject of a US lawsuit. After seeing Curveball, one can see why both the American and German intelligence agencies are exerting considerable influence to prevent its distribution.

Nabers film is a political satire rooted firmly in factual evidence carefully researched by the director and his team. It begins in Iraq where German biologist Dr. Arndt Desert Fox Wolf (Sebastian Blomberg), a biological warfare specialist employed by the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), fails to find any evidence of Saddam Husseins alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The head of the BND, Schatz (Thorsten Merten), is eager to outdo the CIA and be the first to prove that Iraq possesses dangerous nerve gas. An opportunity opens up when an Iraqi seeking asylum in Germany, Rafid Alwan (Dar Salim), claims he worked as a chemical engineer in Iraq and has inside knowledge of the countrys chemical weapons programme.

Wolf is given the job of interrogating Curveball, the alias given to the Iraqi engineer. In exchange for revealing what he knows (in fact, a pack of lies), Alwan requests he be released from incarceration in a German asylum centre and given citizenship.

After a series of interrogations, Alwan takes a hint from Wolf himself and reveals that the reason for the failure of all the intelligence services to find Iraqi WMD is the ingenious use by the Hussein regime of trucks and trains to move the huge chemical vats containing dangerous gases. Absurdly, the two men agree on a crude childish diagram drawn on a napkin purporting to show a truck mounted with the massive vats. Finally, the BND leadership have a scoop to present to their American cousinsand its champagne all round for those concerned. The German chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schrder, also sends his congratulations to the BND.

Desperately seeking evidence to justify a US intervention in Iraq, the CIA is only too willing to accept the scraps from the BNDSs table. It organises the kidnapping of Curveball in Germany in order to present him as its own source. Feeling some obligation to the Iraqi fraudster, BND asset Wolf attempts to rescue him in a hilarious escape scene.

Wolf confronts the CIA agent responsible for the kidnap plan and argues in favour of reliable evidence. The CIA agent is unrepentant: The truth doesnt count, only justice matters. Wolf goes on to ask what gives the CIA the right to distort the facts. We make the facts, the female agent responds.

Towards the end of Curveball, documentary footage is shown of US Secretary of State Colin Powells infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003 in which he regurgitated Curveballs lies to justify Americas subsequent attack on Iraq. In his report, Powell stated that Iraqs weapons programme included biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails, an extensive clandestine network to supply its deadly biological and chemical weapons programmes and the obtaining of sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion. All of this, according to the secretary of state, represented facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

Powells presentation included a sketch of a truck loaded with chemical vats based on Curveballs original napkin drawing. According to one senior US official, Curveballs lies were the main pillar of Powells report to the UN. Sitting in the UN meeting is the German Green Party leader, Joschka Fischer, who listens quietly to Powells report. BND biologist (in the meantime made redundant) Wolf watches Fischer at home on television and asks, Why doesnt he say something?

Fischer was German foreign minister in the government headed by Schrder (Social Democratic Party, SPD). Schrders head of chancellery with responsibility for liaison with Germanys intelligence services was Frank-Walter Steinmeier (also SPD), currently the countrys president.

Nabers Curveball graphically demonstrates the duplicity and criminality of Germanys role in the Iraq war. As chancellor, Schrder publicly declared the German government opposed a new war in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Germanys intelligence agency was providing the lies that Washington used to legitimise its assault on Iraq in the name of the war on terror.

Naber wants to counter what the director declares to be a false portrayal here, an idealised idea of how we Germans operate in the world. It is important, he argues, to tell the truth and question the role of the secret services and politicians responsible at that time, such as Fischer, Schrder and Steinmeier: So that children at school can no longer be taught that we were the good ones when it came to the Iraq war.

To heighten the comedic effect of his film, Naber presents the leading BND figures as provincial careerists in thrall to their American counterparts. In so doing, however, the director runs the risk of seriously underestimating the methods and character of the German ruling elite, which has been trying to achieve greater independence from the US since the reunification of Germany in 1989-1990 and is once again flexing its ruthless imperialist muscles.

In that process, the ruling class draws upon the traditions of Nazism. The BND itself emerged from the Gehlen Organisation (1946-1956), named for Reinhard Gehlen, Hitlers chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front in World War II. After the war, he was recruited by the CIA and headed German intelligence from 1956 to 1968 in close cooperation with the US intelligence agency.

The US bombardment and invasion of Iraq war began a month after Powells testimony. Nabers film ends with statistics detailing the massive loss of Iraqi lives in the subsequent carnage, a mass murder for which Germany also bears direct responsibility.

The end credits also note that The head of the state chancellery at that time is the current federal presidenti.e., the Social Democrat Steinmeier. This credit was greeted with loud applause from the Berlin audience who clearly approved of this unmasking of Germanys leading sanctimonious war-monger.

Nabers film is due to open in German cinemas in September of this year as Film ohne Titel (Film Without a Title).

Another movie that uses black, bitter humour in its treatment of horrifically tragic events is Persian Lessons, directed by Vadim Perelman ( House of S a nd and Fog, 2003). The film is based on a short story by one of Germanys leading scriptwriters, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, and opens in occupied France in World War II with the transport of a group of Jews to a concentration camp.

A young man in the back of the truck carrying the Jews begs another young man, Gilles (Nahuel Prez Biscayart), to accept a valuable book written in Farsi, or Persian, in exchange for some food. Gilles agrees. Shortly afterwards, the truck stops in a forest and the occupants are led off to be summarily shot by the German SA troops responsible for transport to the death camps.

Facing imminent execution, Gilles pleads with the soldiers not to shoot himafter all, he argues, he is not Jewishhe is Persian and has a book to prove it. In a bizarre twist to the narrative, one of the soldiers declares he knows a commandant in the nearest camp who is keen to learn the Persian language, offering 10 cans of meat to anyone who can provide him with a teacher.

In order to survive, Gilles has to invent a phony language that he can administer in daily doses to the camp commandant, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger). Given the task of recording new admissions to the camp, Gilles discovers a formula for memorising his inventory of fictitious words. For his part, the camp commandant practices his newfound tongue, proudly pronouncing snippets of the names of Jewish occupants of the camp, all of whom are eventually executed by their Nazi oppressors. The actors portraying the films two main protagonists, Biscayart as Gilles and Eidinger as Koch, are outstanding.

There are moments of painfully absurdist humour in Persian Lessons in the exchanges between Gilles and the camp commandant, but we are not allowed for a moment to forget the tragic fate of the camps victims at the hands of their brutal captors. The directors juggling of humour and the tragic fate of the Jews under German occupation is reminiscent of the outstanding 1998 film by the Romanian-French director Radu Mihileanu, Train de Vie (Train of Life).

To be continued

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CurveballGermany's role in the Iraq warand the horrors of the concentration camp in Persian Lessons - World Socialist Web Site

Two Americans killed by rocket strike in Iraq

A senior U.S. military source tells Fox News the American service members were killed when rockets struck Camp Taji Military Base, 30 miles north of Baghdad; national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports from the Pentagon.

Daniel Davis: Killing of U.S. military members in Iraq should be followed by withdrawal of American forces

American warplanes launched airstrikes in Iraq Friday morning (local time) against the Iranian-backed Kataeb Hezbollah militia group, the Pentagon announced. The strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack Wednesday on a military base in Iraq that killed two members of the U.S. military and one member of the British military.

The United States will not tolerate attacks against our people, our interests, or our allies, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in a statement. As we have demonstrated in recent months, we will take any action necessary to protect our forces in Iraq and the region.

But while the U.S. should always punish any individual or group that kills Americans, it is time we acknowledge what a growing chorus of experts have been saying: U.S. troops in Iraq should long ago have been withdrawn from harms way.

US FORCES LAUNCH STRIKES TARGETING IRAN-BACKED MILITIAS AFTER DEADLY ROCKET ATTACK, OFFICIAL SAYS

Now that President Trump has ordered a punishing response against those responsible for the attack that killed our military members, it is critical that he order the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq before one more American loses his or her life in a mission that has no clear objective.

All that could possibly be accomplished by our troops has been accomplished. Every day we leave them there they will continue sitting in known locations with targets on their backs. President Trump didnt put those troops there, but with a stroke of his pen he can safeguard them now.

The problems started in 2014. President Barack Obama made a knee-jerk reaction and sent U.S. troops back into Iraq once the city of Mosul had been overrun and entire Iraqi military divisions melted in the face of comparatively weak ISIS forces. The ISIS advance in Syria and Iraq represented real and immediate threats to Damascus and Baghdad, but not the U.S.

The White Houseeven statedthat Obama sent the troops back to Iraq not because of any threat to America, but based upon the assessed needs of the Iraqi Security Forces." That should have been an immediate red flag. American troops should only be asked to risk their lives for the defense of American citizens or interests.

Even with the flawed rationaleObama used in sending troops to Iraq and Syria, once Trump assumed office he gave the troops the achievable mission of driving ISIS from its physical caliphate. That mission was successfully accomplished in late 2017. U.S. troops should then have been withdrawn.

Instead, after months of drift where the military had no identifiable mission at all, the Pentagon settled on another mission that was yet again disconnected from U.S. security: training and advising the Iraqi military. That was a job I performed back in 2009, when I led a team of Army specialists to train and advise an Iraqi border battalion on the Iran-Iraq border.

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On May 6 that year I wrote a letter to a former commander of mine explaining my intense frustration at the pointlessness of our mission. I acknowledged that once we leave, the Iraqi forces will abandon all we taught them and return to conducting their affairs as they had done prior to our arrival.

Senior U.S. leaders were the only ones in denial of this fact a condition that has not changed in the years since my retirement for the Army as a lieutenant colonel after 21 years of active service.

Frankly stated, our military mission in Iraq is not helping keep America and our freedoms safe. Instead, our troops are risking and too often losing their lives for no gain to our country.

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It is beyond question that the Shiite militia that U.S. forces attacked Friday will again vow retribution and attack our troops in the future.

If our elected leaders truly support the troops, they should immediately withdraw our forces from Iraq and Syria. Not one more American should be asked to sacrifice his or her life for the benefit of Iraqi leaders who dont value our presence much anyway.

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Daniel Davis: Killing of U.S. military members in Iraq should be followed by withdrawal of American forces - Fox News

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. will consider a full range of possible responses to a rocket attack against a base in Iraq this week that killed coalition personnel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said.

All options are on the table as we work with our partners to bring the perpetrators to justice and maintain deterrence, Esper told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday. As weve demonstrated in recent months, we will take any actions necessary to protect our forces in Iraq and the region.

Two Americans and a British service member were killed in the Wednesday attack against a base in Iraq only months after a similar assault almost led to a direct military confrontation with Iran. About a dozen were wounded. Katyusha rockets struck Camp Taji, an Iraqi base that hosts coalition personnel for training and advising missions, the coalition said in an emailed statement. Iraqi Security Forces found a rocket-rigged truck a few miles from Camp Taji after the strike, according to the statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and U.K. Foreign Minister Dominic Raab discussed the attack in a call in which they reiterated U.S.-U.K. solidarity on this issue and condemned all attacks against coalition personnel supporting the Iraqi governments efforts to defeat ISIS, according to a U.S. statement. Those responsible for the attacks must be held accountable.

An Iranian-backed Shiite militia group was probably behind the deadly attack as the Islamic Republic continues to use asymmetrical warfare to target American interests across the Middle East, the head of U.S. Central Command said Thursday.

The Iranian proxy group Kataib Hezbollah is the only group known to have previously conducted an indirect fire attack of this scale against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, General Kenneth McKenzie said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. This indicates Irans desire to continue malign activities despite periods of decreased tension with the U.S., he said.

A rocket assault in late December that killed an American contractor and wounded U.S. service personnel resulted in the U.S. striking five bases in Iraq and Syria used by an Iranian-backed militia. Then in early January the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who the Trump administration accused of planning more attacks against American targets. Iran responded by firing more than a dozen missiles at U.S.-Iraqi bases.

The military escalation at the start of the year fueled concerns that the U.S. and Iran could be drawn into an armed confrontation that could easily pull in other countries and destabilize the strategic oil-producing region of the Persian Gulf. Tensions between the two countries had been building since President Donald Trump pulled out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal that had promised rapprochement between Iran and the West.

Close Call

Its a close call, but we doubt that Trump will escalate and attack targets inside of Iran in retaliation for the killing of the Americans in the latest episode, Eurasia Group Chairman Cliff Kupchan and colleagues wrote in a note on Wednesday. Trump faces a Dow in bear territory, faltering global markets, an oil price war and a public health crisis at home. An attack on Iran may push markets off the cliff and risk conflict in a region in the world he wants to depart. But the pressure for a meaningful retaliation will be intense.

Iraqs presidential office issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the attack and called on all sides to show restraint.

The attack Wednesday came as the U.S. House voted to restrict Trumps ability to take military action against Iran unless Congress gives its authorization. The Senate passed the resolution in February, but the president has said hell veto it. Votes in both chambers were far short of the two-thirds majority needed for an override.

Later on Wednesday, explosions were heard in the Iraqi border town of Qaim near Syria after unidentified war jets carried out air strikes targeting some locations, Iraqs al-Sumeria news reported. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in Syria, said on its website that 18 Iraqi militiamen were killed after the unidentified fighter jets hit a base along the Iraq-Syria border used by Iranian-backed militias.

--With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Zaid Sabah.

To contact the reporters on this story: Glen Carey in Washington at gcarey8@bloomberg.net;Travis Tritten in Arlington at ttritten@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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U.S. Weighing All Options to Respond to Iraq Strike, Esper Says - Yahoo Finance

We heard the explosion, likely a car bomb. There were many that day. Thirty minutes later, three Humvees came barreling around the corner of nearby buildings with wounded civilians on their hoods and packed inside. They pulled up to our trauma-stabilization point, a makeshift medical unit in an abandoned home on the outer edge of Mosul, less than three miles from the front line. It was November 2016, and the operation to clear the city of ISIS fighters was fully underway. As we lifted the casualties onto stretchers, Pete, the lead medic of the team, shouted out their triage status: Two red, three yellow, three green! meaning two critically wounded, three moderately injured and three walking wounded. One was a very small girl with a head wound that wouldnt stop bleeding.

Our medical team treated each patient with the standard Tactical Combat Casualty Care method used in combat environments: stop the worst of the bleeding, make sure the patients airway is clear and blood is circulating and prevent hypothermia. Then we loaded the most grievously wounded into the first ambulance bound for a hospital in Erbil, at least three hours away by car, and it sped off in a cloud of dust.

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My heart sank when the ambulance returned minutes later. The back doors flung open and the Iraqi medics brought the stretcher down carrying the girls tiny, lifeless body wrapped in a blanket. Our translator broke down. He had a child the same age. Pete and I hugged. Then we turned off the tears and got back to work.

When I first arrived in Iraq a week earlier, I had no intention of going to Mosul. In addition to being a nurse, Im a photojournalist. My original plan was to photograph women living in displaced-persons camps. But then I met Pete, an E.M.T. and a former United States Marine. For the past several months, he had been in Iraq running a mobile medical team founded by Slovak medics and made up of foreign volunteers. Most of the medical facilities operated by humanitarian aid organizations were located far from the fighting, too far to treat severely wounded trauma patients in time. Because civilian trauma care was not close by, and the Iraqi security forces mandate was to only treat military victims, Petes team made a deal: Bring us civilians, and we will boost your capacity to treat your own men. They agreed.

The members of the team were almost all former military American, Slovak and Norwegian gruff and full of bravado. I liked them. Pete initially responded to my first Facebook message with Hey Alex, followed by a week of radio silence. When we finally met, he and his colleague Derek asked me briefly about my medical background, and that was that. I figured I would stick around for a week or two and then head back to the States. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

For the next eight months, we trailed Iraqi forces as they pushed deeper into the city. We set up makeshift aid stations in homes, schools and sometimes just on the side of the road. The fighting was relentless. Every time a neighborhood was liberated, we would be inundated with wounded soldiers and civilians; our busiest day brought us more than a hundred casualties. Between working in hospitals back home in Minnesota and the years I spent photographing the conflict in Yemen, I had been exposed to plenty of trauma, but nothing prepared me for a still-conscious young man whose brain matter was scattered across the stretcher or a teenage girl with four broken limbs and crushed pelvis delivered on a door frame, covered in glass. Almost worse than the physical wounds were the screams of anguish for lost parents and children.

Amid all of this horror, Pete and I grew close. Intense experiences lead to intense emotions. In him I saw a great leader with a big heart, one who was even more affected than I by the gore we witnessed every day. We became more than each others colleague and confidant. We fell in love quickly and deeply. Our sense of shared mission evolved, too. To treat more patients and run a more organized operation, we founded a new nonprofit, Global Response Management.

In June 2017, coalition forces began an assault to retake Mosuls historic Old City. By that point, our team had treated thousands of people. Each death left me deflated, but I was able to compartmentalize my grief and move on. The adrenaline kept me focused. Then, on June 19, the war suddenly became more personal. That afternoon, we received four casualties, all journalists. Samuel Forey, a French reporter I had got to know, appeared on our doorstep first with shrapnel lodged in his face. He and the other journalists were struck by a roadside bomb while reporting from the Old City, on foot. He told us that the others were still pinned down by the fighting. Theyre trapped, he said. Its bad.

Samuels colleagues eventually arrived. And just as he warned, it was bad. There was Bakhtiyar Haddad, an Iraqi-Kurdish reporter and translator; Stephan Villeneuve, a French video journalist; and Vronique Robert, a Swiss journalist. All three were severely wounded. There was shrapnel in Bakhtiyars chest cavity that had entered under his armpit. Vroniques lower limbs were shattered and she was bleeding from dozens of holes dotting her lower abdomen. Stephan, who managed to climb out of the Humvee ambulance on his own, had no face left at all.

I stabilized Vronique and then transported her to a group of coalition medics. My blood type, she said to me in the ambulance. Im B positive. She departed Mosul in a helicopter. Later that month, I heard that she died at a hospital in France.

Mosul was declared liberated on July 10, 2017. In the months to come, Iraqi families would return to broken homes and broken lives, with little to no resources to deal with the trauma they experienced. Pete and I decided to take a trip to Sri Lanka to decompress. We returned to Iraq two weeks later for the battles of Tal Afar, Hawija and Qaim, and then left again for a vacation in Scotland. It was during that trip that I first started to realize that something was off. One day, Pete and I were walking around Edinburgh, and I was trying to tell him a story, but I couldnt find the words. It was like my brain was tongue tied. I would draw a blank after every other word, unable to remember the names of places or people or everyday objects.

I remained in Iraq for several more months to report on the aftermath of the conflict. Our medical team disbanded when we couldnt obtain funds to initiate a response in Syria, and many of my friends and colleagues left the country. By that point, it was clear that the war had taken a toll on my mental health. I grew increasingly antisocial and lost my creative drive. I felt unmotivated to accomplish anything except the simplest goals, like increasing the number of pull-ups I could do. But the therapists I consulted online all seemed to think I was coping just fine. You dont meet PTSD criteria, I heard again and again.

Whatever was wrong with me, I knew I needed to make some dramatic changes. So I left Iraq. But I didnt return home to Minnesota. Instead, Pete and I moved to rural Idaho. Having burned out on nursing and journalism, I got a job as a wild-land firefighter and spent the next five months swinging a Pulaski ax in the Sawtooth Mountains.

The work was cathartic, and it also gave me ample space and time to think. I thought a lot about the Iraqis who had died in our care, the ones we couldnt save. There was no logic to the guilt we were good at our jobs but it plagued me nonetheless. The death I felt most acutely was Vroniques. Maybe it was because I could see myself in her place: as a woman, as a journalist, as someone who had inserted herself into a war that wasnt her own, who wanted to make a difference. The memory of her fading from consciousness in the back of the ambulance played on repeat in my mind. I drank often and usually alone. It was the only way I could cry.

Pete was experiencing it, too: the apathy, the anger, the high-functioning anxiety. We were comrades, in a sense. While our shared experiences at war added a degree of stress to our relationship small disagreements often escalated into drunken screaming matches we also understood each other better than anyone else. The war might have alienated us from the rest of the world, but it sealed us together.

Eventually, I made my way to a psychiatrist. Though therapy hadnt done much for me in the past, our first session was a watershed moment for me. Nearly a year after leaving Mosul, I finally let my guard down and acknowledged the anger and grief that I had been trying so hard to compartmentalize. Over time, this helped me see that I didnt need to carry the weight of things I could not change. With that revelation, I was able to start letting go of the past. As autumn came and the ground started to frost, I felt the opposite happening internally. The parts of me that had long been frozen my drive, my imagination, my capacity to love began to thaw. I have since returned to nursing and journalism, careers that require a great deal of compassion. That includes, Ive learned, for myself.

Alex Kay Potter is a photojournalist, registered nurse and co-founder of Global Response Management. Her photo book about her experiences in Mosul, The Jaw Still Speaking, will be released in March.

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I Went to Iraq to Take Photographs. I Stayed On as a Medic. - The New York Times