When journalist Nick McDonell returned to Iraq in 2016, he sought to better understand the collateral damage of America's ongoing wars by meeting face-to-face with its besieged survivors. What he found in the ruins of Tikrit, one of the last barriers between ISIS and Baghdad, was a covert alliance of women, embedded against ISIS and fronted by an Iraqi named Wahida, acting as unofficial spies for the US and coalition forces. With her entire family wiped out by ISIS, Wahida has been waging a war of her own-she recruits from the divorce courts of Iraq to find women willing to pose as wives under ISIS rule. The result: air strikes that have liquidated top ISIS figures-and civilians.
The Widow's Network reveals a world where battle lines don't exist, where risks are incalculable, and where everyday women are playing a major role in defeating one of the most depraved and destructive forces of our time.
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[In the late spring of 2016, I visited the Iraqi city of Tikrit to see America's war against the Islamic State]***
(Amazon Original Stories, 30 January 2018, 35 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle #PrimeReading)
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I had high hopes for this piece of writing. The events depicted were not known to me before I read this. I'm still reeling with horror. The book doesn't work for me. It tries to tell the story of women fighting ISIS and evaluate the morality of the war overall. This made it feel like I was reading two different books that never quite came together. There is a distinct split in the book where the author changes focus so the whole thing felt disjointed. I also couldn't feel much sympathy for the women fighting ISIS. I get how evil ISIS were, I really do. However, the leader of the network was so proud of her work targeting ISIS leaders for slaughter that her FaceBook cover image shows her holding the severed head of an ISIS commander. Is she really any better than ISIS? Also, the attacks on ISIS commanders often killed civilians as well and I cannot get behind that. This raises uncomfortable moral questions.
