Book Review [Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate

Abstract

This is a book review of the book by Ben McKelvey (2020), Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate, Hachette Australia. Published by - Hachette Australia (Sydney, 2020) Format - Paperback ISBN - 978-0-7336-4541-9 339 pages Reviewed by John Battersby 'Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate' looks at parallel paths in the Al Qaeda (AQ) and ISIS inspired conflicts of the 2000s. On the one hand, it looks at those who were lured by AQ and ISIS propaganda into conceiving plots in Australia (a number were caught in the Pendennis operation), while another killed a civilian employee in October 2015 and several others left Australia to fight in Iraq and Syria in the period of ISIS’s ascendency. At the same time McKelvey relates the coinciding story lines of a number of Australian special forces personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 and after 2003 (including the mid-2010s) to Iraq. Their exploits are detailed, the rationale for their deployment and operations is given, and light is shone on the consequences for those individuals personally. It is too often the fate of those who give their loyalty and commitment to their country, to discover that their country seldom reciprocates in equal measure. The inconsequential occasional mis-demeanours by highly disciplined servicemen that offend the sensibilities of their higher commanders were punished harshly, and the enormous personal and psychological toll that inevitably falls on individuals deployed to war-zones has not been adequately addressed by Australia. Service personnel surviving war zones to commit suicide when they come home is not an acceptable outcome of these deployments.