Mosul

There are also a lot of videos showing many destroyed vehicles, captured vehicles in the assault on Mocha.

And at the same time, video of marching Houthis or sympathetic to Houthis with small arms, automatic weapons and RPGs, marching in a way that was suggestive of the celebration of ISIS when it entered parts of the former Iraq, Mosul, for example.

Bridget, a very good day to you.

What do we know right now about where the Houthis are and what they're threatening? Good day to you.

So I was reading the chapter on Iraq, and I'm very happy that you included a chapter on Iraq, because I think this is one of those stories of the world that we very rarely hear about, you know, the the kind of human life of Iraq, which is obviously something I'm very interested in.

You described the story of this couple from Mosul, and part of their story absolutely would be made part of the news today.

You know, their son is born in the final days of the offensive to recapture the city from ISIS.

But what you focus on is the struggles of getting married during that time while ISIS is ruling the city.

And so actually the Iraq chapter, I didn't know what the story was going to be until I met the couple that ended up, that I, like, I interviewed lots of people.

I met lots of people.

I was talking about weddings and I was talking about the situation in Mosul.

I actually went there.

So we debated mocha as a coffee center, not as a weakness in the line.

It now turns out to be Mosul of Yemen.

Yes.

And the next step would be Aden itself on the coast.

I did Afghanistan.

I did Iraq up in the northern part in Mosul.

I trained with the Kurdish up there.

And then U.S. Marines out in the west coast of America, east coast of America, all over the Middle East training, Albanian armed forces, you name it.

I can deal with that, you know? Um, so for me, asymmetric warfare group was synonymous with the surge, the pre-surge and the surge.

You know, I, I got up to Mosul in oh five and, uh, between oh five, uh, and, uh, oh seven, I only paid two months of federal taxes.

Um, between June 05 and May of 07.

So for two years, I paid two months of federal taxes.

But, um, And then he's replaced with Leon Panetta.

But yeah, so as long as we're on that topic, this is a guy who armed Sunni insurgents in Mosul, who then armed the Bata Brigade, the Shiite militia, to be the Iraqi army and help make the civil war that much worse and employed the guy, the Wolf Brigade, torturing people to death with power drills in Iraq.

Yes.

Then he was the one who demanded and pushed all of his political pull to force the escalation, the tripling of the Afghan war by 70,000 soldiers into the massive Afghan surge, which then was an absolute failure.

And you can read the DIA report under Mike Flynn saying the exact same thing.

But I was the most paranoid guy in the world telling everybody that this is wide open space in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Patrick Coburn, the greatest American reporter in Iraq, had been there, said the Iraqi army is basically nonexistent in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, and in Mosul.

And the bin Ladenites could just roll right in here.

Stretches of conglomerate and red rocks were interspersed with grassy slopes.

The river was no longer disturbed by rocks and rapids, and our two kalekjis had been replaced by a bright-faced youth who was going to take us single-handed as far as Mosul.

"Am I not a good kalekji?" he kept on saying to us.

"See how quick I make the raft go.

When you get to Mosul you will remember what a good kalekji I was." And standing up on the raft, grasping the two oars, he would throw himself right backwards, causing the raft to shoot on through the sluggish stream.

Then when we got into a faster bit of current he would lean on his oars and roll up a cigarette, talking all the time.

"The ladies like me, do they not? They see I am a good kalekji.

They surely like me better than their other kalekjis." Six rafts laden with merchandise had followed us from Jezireh, and one with a hut similar to ours and flying the Turkish crescent was conveying a Turkish jazbashi with his harem to Mosul.