On the ground in Leer, South Sudan —

When war came to 15-year-old Rebecca Riak Chol’s small town in rural South Sudan in early April, she and 27 other villagers fled into nearby marshlands to hide. They spent two grueling weeks slowly making their way to the relative safety of a region controlled by rebels from her same tribe. They were constantly hungry, constantly thirsty, and constantly in danger of being killed by the troops trying to hunt them down. Chol’s sister died along the way, but it wasn’t because she was found and shot. Instead, she — like growing numbers of South Sudanese — died from starvation.

“We didn’t have anything to dig with to bury her, so we just put grass on the body and left it there,” Chol told me during a conversation in the schoolyard of her new home in the small town of Thoahnom Payam. Two school buildings with mud walls and tin roofs flanked the dry dirt yard. In the center was an unused volleyball net.

One of Chol’s classmates, 16-year-old Marco Nuer, arrived here in February from a different violence-ravaged part of the country. Like Chol, he paid an enormous price: His father, brother, and sister starved to death along the way. He and his mother were the only ones to survive.

The two stories are tragically common in South Sudan, which is facing mass hunger on a scale unimaginable in almost every other part of the world. In February, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 South Sudanese were starving, and that 5 million more — 42 percent of the country’s population — have such limited access to proper food that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. More recent figures are not available yet, but aid agencies fear the situation could be much worse now.

There are two things you need to understand about the famine decimating South Sudan, the world’s newest country and one that came into existence largely because of enormous assistance from the US.

First, South Sudan isn’t the only country in the region facing mass starvation. A potentially historic famine is also threatening Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. Far from Western eyes and far from the headlines, an estimated 20 million people in those four countries are at risk of dying due to a lack of food.

The UN has already officially declared a full-fledged famine in parts of South Sudan and warned that the other three countries will suffer mass death from food and water shortages if “prompt and sustained humanitarian intervention” doesn’t happen soon.

Second, these famines weren’t caused by natural disasters like crop failures or droughts. They were man-made — the direct result of the bloody wars and insurgencies raging in all four countries.

The upshot is that the current famines, unlike others in recent history, could have potentially been prevented.

Washington, which has been slow to act, seems to finally be taking steps to help fight the famine. The Trump administration proposed massive funding cuts to America’s humanitarian food aid, but Congress rejected those cuts and instead allocated close to $1 billion in new funding.

In a recent interview with Vox, Michael Bowers, the vice president of humanitarian leadership and response for the aid group Mercy Corps, said the current famine was “entirely avoidable.”

“It’s entirely a man-made construct right now, and that means we have it within our power to stop that,” he said. “Wars are hard to stop; famines are not.”

On the ground here in South Sudan, the civil war that has left millions on the brink of starvation shows no signs of ending anytime soon. And that means the numbers of men, women, and children dying from lack of food will continue to increase into the indefinite future.

In the intensive care unit of an International Medical Corps hospital in the capital city of Juba, the beds are occupied by the tiny, skeletal frames of malnourished children. The building is a simple temporary structure made of cinderblocks and plywood. Although children under 5 years old are the most vulnerable to malnutrition and the infections it can cause in small bodies, they are also incredibly resilient and almost always bounce back if fed high-calorie foods and given proper medicine.

The problem is that huge numbers of South Sudanese children aren’t getting that type of food. Many, in fact, aren’t getting food of any kind.

Most famines are caused by nature. These are caused by war.

Many American adults first learned about the very idea of an African famine in 1985, when Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson brought together some of the biggest stars in rock and pop music to record a song called “We Are the World.” It was part of an effort to raise money to fight a famine that killed a million people in Ethiopia between 1983 and 1985.

The song — which also included stars like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, and Willie Nelson — eventually sold an astounding 20 million copies and raised more than $10 million for relief caused largely by a devastating drought in the impoverished country.

The crisis in the 1980s pales in comparison to the famine happening today. Because it isn’t just happening in one country; it’s happening in four.  

Take Nigeria, where a bloody insurgency by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has created a growing humanitarian disaster. Since the group declared war on the country’s central government in 2009, millions of civilians — including huge numbers of farmers — have been forced from their homes to escape the group’s campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings. With the agricultural systems of hard-hit areas in near collapse because of the fighting, the UN estimates that at least 4.8 million people are in need of urgent food assistance.

Somalia, long synonymous with civil war and hunger, risks suffering its second famine of the past five years alone. The UN says that more than 6 million Somalis — fully half the country’s population — need food aid.

The problem is that the government of Somalia doesn’t control huge swaths of the country. Much of it is still run by the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. The ongoing conflict between the government in Mogadishu and the al-Qaeda-aligned group has devastated the economy and made it far harder to bring aid into the country.

But it’s Yemen, where 7 million people are facing starvation, that’s perhaps the clearest illustration of how war is directly causing famine. The Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen has suffered from food shortages for years, but a war between the Saudi-backed government in exile and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control much of the north of the country has brought food shipments into Yemen to a grinding halt.  

With US assistance, Saudi warplanes have destroyed bridges, roads, factories, farms, food trucks, animals, water infrastructure, and agricultural banks across the north, while imposing a blockade on the territory. For a country heavily dependent on foreign food aid, that means starving the people.

Coastal communities on the Red Sea are particularly hard hit, with fishermen unable to go out in their boats due to the risk of being bombed from above. In remote mountainous villages inland, whatever food makes it in is so expensive that many people cannot afford to buy it. The lifeline for aid getting into Yemen is Hudaydah port on the Red Sea, which is controlled by the Houthi rebels. Saudi Arabia bombed it in August 2015.

In early May, the head of a leading European aid agency described being “shocked to the bone” after a visit to Yemen.

“This is a gigantic failure of international diplomacy,” Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a statement. “Men with guns and power inside Yemen as well as in regional and international capitals are undermining every effort to avert an entirely preventable famine, as well as the collapse of health and education services for millions of children. Nowhere on earth are as many lives at risk.”

Except, perhaps, for South Sudan.

The world’s youngest country is being ripped apart by war and starvation

South Sudan was born into aching poverty. After decades of civil war and neglect, the country finally gained its independence from the North in 2011, in large part due to the active assistance of the Obama administration and many of Washington’s key allies.

Early on, hopes that the fledgling country might finally begin to emerge from the depths of deprivation ran high. Then–US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice delivered a speech in Juba at the ceremony marking the formation of the state. “The Republic of South Sudan is being born amid great hopes — the hope that you will guarantee the rights of all citizens, shelter the vulnerable, and bring prosperity to all corners of your land,” she told the hundreds of thousands in attendance.

But that optimism may have been misplaced. There are just 200 kilometers of paved roads in a country the size of France, making it difficult for farmers to sell their crops and buy new seeds. Food shortages have haunted rural communities for some time, and cattle raiding — where armed men steal entire herds from nearby villages and towns — is a regular occurrence.

Even if a South Sudanese family owned cattle and had planted crops, all of that would soon disappear when war came to their doorstep. Plants would die because farmers fled and never returned. Animals would be stolen or left to starve or die from dehydration.

Food shortages and acute hunger may have been almost inevitable for a country that had had trouble feeding itself even in the relative moments of calm before the current storm.

That storm erupted in 2013, when the country’s president, Salva Kiir, and his vice president, Riek Machar, went to war. Kiir accused Machar of a coup attempt, which Machar denied. In reality, the split was caused by a toxic mixture of decades of deep resentment over tribal differences heightened during the previous civil war, and a fear that the country’s oil resources would not be fairly divided. Kiir, who is from the dominant Dinka tribe, controlled the country’s armed forces. Machar, from the minority Nuer group, controlled a loose network of tribal militias. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, and more than 50,000 are estimated to have died in the fighting.

In recent months, government troops have been conducting “counterinsurgency” efforts in areas where the people are Nuer or from other tribes considered supportive of the rebels. The government says it’s a necessary part of any effort to contain militants and end the fighting; most of the world sees it as the collective punishment of civilians.

“Without civilians, those fighters won’t have a place to stay, receive food, receive popular support,” Jonathan Pedneault of Human Rights Watch told me. “So the aim by targeting civilians is meant to cut the grass under the feet of those fighters.”

That includes chasing people away from the very thing their lives depend on — food.

Rebecca Chol and her classmate Marco Nuer saw that punishment up close. Their families lived in one of the areas most heavily targeted by the current military campaign. When the fighting got closer to their hometowns, both fled, with little food or water and no way of finding more.

Like many of their friends and relatives, Chol and Nuer escaped into the enormous marshes that flank the White Nile river, which provide places to hide from troops who are unable to access the area by truck or car. But that safety can come at a huge cost: There is nothing to eat there, so people who survive attacks by gunmen end up perishing slowly from hunger.

The village of Thoahnom Payam, where we met Chol and Nuer, is only accessible by traditional dugout canoes, which glide silently between the tall reeds as small, colorful birds fly overhead. It’s a remarkably beautiful landscape, with only a few clues of the chaos in the air. The occasional group of rebel fighters float by, crouched into floating hollow logs, their long legs around their ears, AK-47s in hand.

Water lily roots are the only thing people in the marshes have to eat. The town Chol and her surviving relatives now call home lacks enough food to feed all the refugees. Instead, she and her family are still trying to survive based on what they can scavenge in the marshes.

On a searing hot day in mid-April, Chol’s mother, Tipasa, took me down to a nearby swamp to forage for something for dinner. Bent over with her arms and legs deep in the muddy waters, she pulled up lilies like weeds and ripped off their small, stumpy roots. She collected the lily roots in a plastic container so they could be soaked before being eaten. They were bumpy black nubs, the size of daffodil bulbs. They looked inedible.

Chol’s family may soon get better stuff to eat. It’s relatively peaceful in the town, and Western aid agencies are operating in the nearby village of Ganyiel. At the center of the rebel-held town is a market place where stalls sell tea and some dried fish from the local rivers. A dirt landing strip nearby receives UN helicopters. Here, international aid agencies have some of their most crucial, and remote, outposts. It seems like only a matter of time until food shipments start arriving in Thoahnom Payam, just 30 minutes away by canoe.

Back in Leer, where Marco Nuer came from, things are much worse. The town, occupied by government troops, is destroyed and abandoned. The only building intact is a green steel church, empty of any furniture, with the door hanging off. The main street of shops and stalls has been razed to the ground, with sheets of steel scattered about in the grass and rusting vehicles lining the side of the main dirt road.

A few miles down that road is rebel-held land. It is a parched, open space with some trees and shrubs scattered around. The heat from the midday sun is unbearable. A few hundred people — originally residents of Leer and the surrounding villages — had crept out of hiding as news spread of a food drop by an aid plane. All of these people had left family members in the marshes, waiting anxiously for them to bring back the food. These thin, tired people were the strongest and most capable of making the journey.

They waited with remarkable patience, sitting silently under trees as bags of maize, recently dropped from a plane circling above, were piled up by volunteers wearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) bibs.

“Life in the swamps is terrible, because when the soldiers come you have to go to the river and hide in the water,” said Mary Nayiel. She was waiting under a tree for some help.

“You sit, in the water like this for up to 12 hours,” she told me, crouching down on the ground. She had six children starving in the marshes, waiting for her to return with food.

Nayiel and the other women sitting with her were waiting to be given seeds and tools to plant them with. The ICRC handed out hoes and axes as well as maize seeds to grow some crops in rebel-held land outside the swamps. If they planted before the rains came, then they could harvest in August. Many of the people sitting near me will die long before the crops are ready to eat.

Scott Doucet of the ICRC was overseeing the handouts nearby. Before the war, he said, the region was capable of feeding itself.

“There were a lot of cattle and livestock in this area,” he told me, standing next to a crowd of people sitting in line on the ground. “They were farmers, there was commerce, there was a market here where I am standing right now. All of this is gone now.”

The charred remains of shops and stalls were still clear under our feet. A few ashy stumps showed where some of the sturdier shop buildings had been. A few hundred yards away, several huge cattle horns lay on the parched soil. The idea of having meat to eat here seemed farcical now.

Government soldiers had burned down the small market when they had taken the area earlier in the conflict. Now villagers who once bought and sold food here are being kept alive with charitable handouts. The town wasn’t always starving. It got that way because of war.

For those fleeing war, hunger can seem like an affordable price to pay for safety

It would take truly horrific violence for South Sudanese parents to flee into the marshes given the very real — and in some ways likely — chances of watching their children starve to death there. But that kind of horrific violence, unfortunately, is part of daily life in many parts of the country.

Ruot Machar was standing with a group of older men in the area where ICRC was handing out aid, some leaning on their spears — a reminder of the feeble defense civilians in this country have against well-armed government or rebel troops. Most of them had the deep horizontal scars of the Nuer tribe markings across their foreheads.

“War and hunger are the two dangers in our lives now because they are killing children in the war and the hunger is killing us also,” he said. “Both of these things are so dangerous for us.”

“I don’t know why the government is doing this,” he added. “We are their people.”

With no real international efforts underway to wind down the war, the most fortunate of South Sudan’s starving people are the ones who have reached camps run by the United Nations, where Western aid agencies are providing food, shelter, and medical facilities. The organizations are keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive; the problem is that millions more live in remote areas of this vast country that the aid groups simply can’t get to. The aid workers themselves are also increasingly at risk.

South Sudan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, but it has quickly become the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian workers. More than 80 aid workers — mostly South Sudanese — have been killed since the conflict began. Female foreign aid workers were gang-raped by rampaging government soldiers who stormed a hotel in Juba during last July’s violence in the capital.

While I was in the country in April, three South Sudanese employees of the UN’s World Food Program were violently murdered in the western city of Wau. The WFP said they were trying to get to the warehouse during an outbreak of violence but were killed along the way. Two died of machete wounds, and another was shot.

“Looting is a huge problem,” said the country director of one Western charity. “Every time we have to pull out of an area, entire stocks of food and supplies are taken.”

Charities have been forced by the government to leave areas where their help is needed. In Leer, access has been granted again by the government, but it’s patchy. There used to be compounds and warehouses for some aid agencies there, but they were all burned down during the fighting.

International aid agencies in South Sudan are in a tough position. Caught between an increasingly belligerent and threatening government and the more than 5 million people on the brink of starvation, they are trying to keep people alive without openly condemning the government for their part in starving them in the first place. If they do, they risk being kicked out of the country.

At least one agency, while helping journalists get crucial access to cover the famine, was forced to gently request we keep their name out of our reports if we do focus very tightly on the war, and not simply the hunger. They know both are connected, but run the risk of being accused by the government of bringing reporters to places where they can do what Kiir’s regime considers to be “negative” stories about it.

On February 20, just days after the UN officially declared that South Sudan was in the midst of a famine, the government in Juba shocked the world by announcing a hike in visa prices for aid workers — from $100 to $10,000. That hasn’t been implemented, but it’s a stark reminder to aid agencies that their relationship with the government is increasingly shaky.

South Sudan is trying to cover up the scope of the disaster. It won’t work.

Journalists are also struggling to gain access to the country as the government hopes to control the image of the hunger crisis and steer the rhetoric away from it being war-driven.

Once inside, intimidation is rife. In nearly 10 years of reporting from conflict zones, I have never worked in an environment where government intimidation is so strong. My cameraman was arrested and detained at a police station for filming a long gas line, and I was detained with him on another occasion while filming some cows. Plainclothes police are on every street corner in Juba, and race towards foreign reporters as soon as they spot them, refusing to recognize the government-issued accreditation they have been issued.

The government shut Al Jazeera English’s bureau in Juba on May 2 after objecting to a story where a reporter interviewed Machar’s rebels, and an American NPR reporter was detained for several days after being arrested at his hotel in the capital by security forces.

For South Sudanese journalists, it’s even worse: They’ve faced a violent campaign against them since the beginning of the war. In August 2015, President Kiir said publicly, “The freedom of press does not mean that you work against your country. And if anybody among them does not know this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day on them.” Three days later, a reporter working for the independent New Nation paper was shot dead in the street.

The government of South Sudan will not realistically be able to stop the news of its famine, nor the fact that it was entirely man-made, from being reported. But we’re rapidly approaching the point of no return: Without an immediate and sustained effort to end the violence ravaging South Sudan and the other three nations, the world will for the first time in living memory be faced with four simultaneous famines.

The worst humanitarian disaster since World War II will have been one that was caused by, and therefore could have been prevented by, humans.

Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour. She has lived in the Middle East for nine years and is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her reporting on this story was done in partnership with the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

She took these photos in South Sudan in April, 2017.

Editors: Yochi Dreazen, Jennifer Williams
Graphics: Javier Zarracina
Copy editor: Tanya Pai
Video: Sam Ellis
Project manager and producer: Susannah Locke

MOSUL, Iraq — The rip of machine gun fire disturbed the quiet on the second floor of a mosque in Mosul’s Zahra district. Lying on their bellies across the room, three Iraqi soldiers peered over the guns they’d pointed through smashed windows, anxiously scanning for ISIS fighters. A few feet away, their commander, Major Ziad al-Gubere, paced up and down, radio in hand, talking to other Iraqi Army units in the area.

Beyond the mosque was ISIS territory, and Gubere was trying to make sure his men killed the enemy fighters hoping to breach this front line. Outside in the street, a pile of tangled metal and rubble was stacked up on the road like a barricade from the French Revolution. “You see these guys?” Gubere asked in disgust, pointing over the pile. “One of them blew himself up over there.” Gubere is middle-aged and in constant motion: He always seemed to be marching somewhere, with others behind trying to catch up.

These dozen or so special forces soldiers from Iraq’s US-trained Golden Brigade have fought a series of grinding battles to make it to this point. Gubere’s men are part of the broad military push to take back Mosul, once Iraq’s second-biggest city, from the ISIS militants who have held it for more than two years. Reconquering the city is the biggest test to date of the Obama administration’s preferred strategy for defeating the group: using American airpower to pound the group from the air while helping to arm and train the loose alliance of Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish peshmerga forces, Shia paramilitaries, and Sunni tribal fighters battling ISIS on the ground.

The offensive began just over a month ago with a quick series of successful efforts to flush ISIS fighters out of villages on the outskirts of the sprawling city. Iraqi forces have retaken a third of the city east of the Tigris river, but the assault has slowed in recent days as the Iraqi forces entered Mosul’s densely packed streets. The fighting has morphed into bloody street-by-street, building-by-building urban warfare. Baghdad doesn’t release official casualty figures, but some medics estimate that it is at least in the low dozens. As of late October, US officials said ISIS had lost roughly 900 fighters.

But as troops like Gubere’s advance, they’re encountering all of the worst-case scenarios that US military planners had been predicting before the fighting got underway. ISIS suicide bombers are ramming heavily armored trucks into Iraqi positions, killing and maiming soldiers whose machine guns are powerless to stop the Mad Max–looking vehicles.

Networks of underground tunnels and pathways through neighborhoods are allowing ISIS fighters to ambush their enemies and then slip away. ISIS fighters set fire to barrels of oil so smoke will obscure their movements and make it harder for US warplanes and drones to target them. The group uses Iraqi civilians, including children, as human shields.

ISIS is also mounting sophisticated attacks combining car bombs with teams of fighters armed with suicide belts. The ISIS fighters attack in waves, firing their guns for as long as possible and then blowing themselves up to kill more Iraqi soldiers. In a nearby open market, now abandoned and pockmarked with bullet holes, flies buzzed around the bloodied body parts of ISIS fighters who killed themselves in a recent battle. Iraqi soldiers took pictures with their smartphones before wandering back to their front line barricade. An unexploded belt — khaki green, bloodied, and apparently abandoned — lay on a nearby market stall table.

The Iraqis are being helped by roughly 5,000 US troops who are nominally there solely to train and arm the Iraqi forces, in addition to a contingent of US special forces fighting directly alongside the Iraqis. American warplanes and artillery are also battering ISIS targets throughout the city, and the Pentagon says US and allied forces had, as of November 1, launched 2,400 precision bombs, artillery rounds, missiles, and rockets into the Mosul area since the campaign began on October 17.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced the use of Apache attack helicopters over Mosul. They can fly lower and slower than jets, allowing them to give fire support to Iraqi forces, but that also brings American pilots within close range of ISIS’s ground weapons.

ISIS, meanwhile, is defending the city with a hybrid of insurgent tactics and more conventional warcraft — a dark harbinger of what US-backed rebels may face in coming weeks when they ramp up an attempt to reclaim the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s headquarters and primary stronghold. Although the fight for Raqqa will be carried out by rebels rather than a conventional army as in Mosul, the current fighting could provide crucial intelligence on what they can expect from the ISIS fighters barricaded there.

Reclaiming Mosul and Raqqa would deal a serious blow to the group and rip out the heart of its self-proclaimed caliphate. But after spending three days with the Iraqi special forces, Iraq’s Ninth Armored Division, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters on the front lines of the battle here, it is clear to me this fight won’t be quick, won’t be easy, and won’t happen without significant numbers of military and civilian casualties.

Tunnels, armored car bombs, and the Islamic State’s new kind of guerrilla war

ISIS snatched control of Mosul in 2014 as it swept across the country, and has had two years to prepare for the moment Baghdad sent forces to take it back. Any hopes that ISIS wouldn’t stand and fight, or would make a strategic withdrawal to its Syrian capital in Raqqa, have disappeared fast.

Instead, the group has unleashed new weapons and planned innovative attacks that probe the Iraqi forces’ weak spots. Suicide car bombs are being fitted with a heavy armored casing so bullets can’t stop them as they appear around corners and careen toward soldiers in the city’s network of narrow streets. Unless soldiers have anti-tank missiles, there is little they can do when one of those car bombs approaches except look for cover and pray for safety.

“You have no choice; you have to run away,” said Kurdish peshmerga Col. Ahmad Mala Rash, in a town outside Mosul. “If he gets in the middle of us, he will kill all of us.”

In Mosul, cars can be hidden behind walls in small backyards. In response, civilians have been banned from driving, and roads are blocked with piles of dirt, scrap metal, and the debris of war, as Iraqi forces try to keep the deadly car bombs at bay.

“ISIS uses a new technique: They hide the car bombs between civilian houses,” said Gubere. “When we get close to them they send it to us.”

While we are in a house down the street from the mosque, Gubere hears on the radio that more ISIS fighters are approaching and sends half a dozen of his men to the roof. Gunfire erupts almost immediately.

“Your head, watch your head!” Gubere shouts at the young men as they pop up and down to shoot over the wall at ISIS fighters in a building next door.

“In the neighborhood in front of us there is a group of ISIS fighters, and a car bomb also,” a young Iraqi special forces soldier named Mohammed said during a short break from the shooting. Despite the circumstances, he is shy, and looks at the ground when speaking. “They always try to send car bombs.”

While the new car bombs compensate for ISIS’s lack of heavily armored vehicles, underground tunnels make up for their significantly smaller numbers. Up to 100,000 troops from various arms of the Iraqi military and allied factions are fighting what are believed to be less than 5,000 militants inside the city.

The extent of ISIS’s network of tunnels became clear when Kurdish peshmerga forces stormed the town of Bashiqa, 8 miles east of Mosul city, earlier this month. Throughout the town and countryside around it, ISIS fighters were able to pop up behind the advancing fighters and shoot at them before disappearing again. Although the Kurds did ultimately take the town, the tactic inflicted casualties as confused soldiers struggled to deal with a seemingly invisible enemy.

Inside one tunnel, sleeping mattresses were strewn along the dirt floors, along with uniforms, gas lanterns, and a wall clock. The atmosphere is muffled and repressive. The tunnel ends inside a house — the piled earth that was excavated to create the underground refuge is still in the room, hidden from the view of coalition drones.

Rash, the Kurdish colonel, walked through the tunnel ahead, stooped over under its low mud ceiling, gun hanging over his right shoulder.

“One ISIS fighter hid in a tunnel for five hours, with 60 peshmerga trying to get him out,” he said, astonished. “So they put tires inside the entrances and burned them. He suffocated.”

Entering underground passageways is deadly for Iraqi forces, as ISIS fighters hidden in the dark are ready to start shooting. Rash lost two of his men that way.

“ISIS were inside and we tried to control it. They shot them in the forehead — they were really good snipers,” he said.

Beyond the tunnels, ISIS fighters have torn holes in the walls separating Mosul’s tightly packed rows of houses and other buildings, allowing them to move from fighting position to fighting position without venturing outside. The fighters can take advantage of territory they know better than the attacking forces, flanking the Iraqi military as it moves through muddy streets slowly in Humvees.

Even when ISIS retreats, its fighters leave booby-trapped houses and streets behind. Iraqi bomb disposal experts are being maimed and killed by the cruel inventiveness of the group’s explosive experts. Abdullah Ali is a bomb disposal engineer with the Nineveh forces, a Sunni tribal group. Lying on a hospital bed in the Kurdish city of Erbil and clearly in shock, he told me what happened when he was south of Mosul trying to defuse an ISIS bomb.

“When I entered a house there was a barrel of gas, and I moved it and it exploded on me,” he said. There is a scabbed wound where his right eye used to be. He peered out through the left one, bloodshot and bruised.

“The bomb defusers are the most important people in the battle,” he added. Later, staring into the space in front of him he said, “We must continue this work. It’s no problem; we are all going to die.”

The Iraqi government does not release the number of soldiers killed in combat, and filming or photographing the dead is not allowed, making it difficult to tell how many troops have been killed so far. But the numbers are thought to be considerable.

Human shields, homemade white flags, and bodies in the rubble

Clearing the neighborhoods taken by the Iraqi security forces will require time-consuming and meticulous work by experts like Ali. Now, as the front line edges forward, behind it are growing areas with a thin security presence resembling a no-man’s land, save for the odd Humvees passing through on their way to and from the front line. Civilians are present in these areas, in their homes, but those fleeing the fighting deeper inside the city are a common sight, walking in slow, mournful lines, their children waving homemade white flags tied to the end of sticks.

In the Intisar neighborhood on the outskirts of Mosul, a middle-aged man who called himself Saad said the fighting in his street had been going on for three days. His tiny daughter, in a pink sweater, her hair in pigtails, held his hand and walked quietly. She did not flinch at the sound of outgoing mortars and gunfire in the distance. His five other children, wife, and two parents were somewhere in the crowd of people shuffling slowly down the road carrying blankets and small suitcases.

Occasionally the whiz of a bullet can be heard overhead in areas where civilians are fleeing.

“The danger is from the ISIS snipers,” said Saad.

People like him and his family are another tool for ISIS in this battle. Mosul is densely packed with an estimated 1 million civilians, many still living in their homes as the battles rage around them. They are an effective human shield for the militants against their enemies’ most efficient weapons.

“The coalition airstrikes are very limited, because there are too many civilians,” complained Ninth Armored Division Col. Mohaned Said Alwan, sitting next to a campfire. “Because there are civilians in the city, we can’t shoot freely.”

In the streets nearby, hundreds of people were finishing their miserable march from the fighting in their areas, waiting to be loaded onto trucks bound for refugee camps. Iraqi soldiers have no way of distinguishing ISIS fighters from the innocent.

Government food handouts are being provided in areas where people are able to stay in their homes. Many had to shelter for days as the battle raged, running out of supplies but too frightened to venture out.

“We were scared — we heard the rockets and were afraid they would hit us,” said one woman standing at her front door. “We were hiding in the house. We had no food, no water.”

Just down the street, men were anxiously standing in line for bags of food next to four mangled bodies of ISIS fighters, while Iraqi soldiers danced on top of their Humvees in celebration.

When the fight for Mosul ends, a civil war could erupt

The revelries often take on a sectarian tone. Shia flags with the face of Hussein Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed and a major Shia religious figure, fly on the back of the Humvees of Iraqi special forces, and soldiers plant them on the houses where ISIS fighters had been based.

That highlights a serious risk: If and when Mosul is retaken, the Kurdish forces, Shia paramilitaries, and Sunni tribal fighters could find themselves fighting each other for control of the city and its surrounding areas.

Uniformed Iraqi soldiers could also be part of the fray; they are Shia-dominated, so it’s not clear if they would take up arms against their fellow Shia paramilitaries or perhaps merely stand aside.

ISIS espouses a radical, strict form of Sunni Islam, and its members were initially welcomed into places like Mosul and other predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq by some residents after years of sectarian discrimination by the Shia-dominated Baghdad government. Many have blamed the rise of ISIS on Baghdad’s systematic repression of Iraq’s Sunnis, which included moves like mass arrests, arbitrary detention, and the killing of Sunni protesters.

In a village on the outskirts of Mosul, Ninth Armored Division vehicles bumped down muddy streets with Shia flags flying next to the Iraqi flags on the back. Civilians ate handouts of rice and vegetables outside a nearby Sunni mosque.

I asked a soldier why a Shia flag was flying from its minaret. “It is a sign of our victory,” he answered.

For the most part, though, Shia militias have avoided entering Mosul or attacking its Sunni citizens. In a war-battered Iraq, where sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia have erupted into all-out civil war in the past, that counts as a major win.

After ISIS swept across Iraq in 2014 and easily overran the Iraqi military, Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (religious edict) calling for young Shia men to join various fighting groups to stop ISIS. The government called them Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), but few recognize them as anything other than Shia militias. Many are funded and commanded from Iran. That makes their involvement in the war against ISIS in Iraq deeply controversial.

When Iraqi troops took back Fallujah from ISIS in June, Shia militias were involved in detaining men who fled. Human Rights Watch has accused the groups of disappearing 600 Sunni men.

“We have seen in numerous occasion where their forces have taken part in operations to retake lands from ISIS that abuses have occurred,” Belkis Wille, Human Rights Watch’s senior Iraq researcher, said in September. “What we have seen is mostly men being abducted. Sometimes detained, tortured but then released, but on many occasions these men have never been seen again.”

Some of these same Shia militias fought and killed American soldiers in Iraq in the past. It is an ironic reflection of the complicated alliances being formed to fight ISIS that US airpower is now indirectly giving cover to such groups on the ground.

Just north of Tikrit, which is 200 kilometers south of Mosul, one such group — the Badr Brigades — were holding a dusty hilltop overlooking oil fields in September when their local commander told me that his organization would most certainly be involved in the operation for Mosul.

“What are the American forces in Iraq — their significance? The Badr Organization is Iraqi. America, what brought them?” he said to me. “The Iraqi is stronger. He defends his country.”

So far the militias are stationed outside Mosul, in a strategic eastern area near the Syrian border where they are hoping to retake the town of Tal Afar. Taking Tal Afar and the surrounding areas would cut supply lines between Mosul and ISIS-controlled Syria, as well as shut off potential escape routes for ISIS commanders during any retreat from Mosul.

However, the Iraqi government exercises little control over them, and if they enter Mosul itself, their presence would provide ISIS with a major propaganda victory and the sectarian showdown the group craves. ISIS is already drawing attention to Shia flags being flown by the military in its online videos. The most recent, released last week, shows ISIS fighters looting Humvees they have destroyed and angrily holding Shia flags up to the camera.

Kurdish peshmerga fighters from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region east of Mosul have also warned against Shia militia involvement. Yet they, too, have been accused of using the fight for Mosul to their own benefit.

Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani told a local TV station on Wednesday that his forces would not retreat from areas Kurdish troops had retaken from ISIS before the battle for Mosul began. Some of those areas are disputed, and human rights organizations have accused Kurdish forces of destroying Arab homes.

However, US commanders point out that so far the cooperation among Iraq’s various fighting forces and factions already represents a victory of sorts given the clear dangers of the groups turning on each other.

“It is certainly a challenge — there are old rivalries that exist,” said US Army Col. Brett Sylvia, who heads up the US’s advise-and-assist program for Mosul. “What we are seeing in terms of the coordination and the collaboration that is taking place on the ground has been in my mind unprecedented. … People that in the past have had very divergent views are now all working together against one common enemy.”

Mosul is a battle. It’s not the entire war.

The complexities of building a cohesive alliance among various groups to fight ISIS will likely be harder for the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of ISIS’s caliphate.

Take Turkey, which has deployed troops to both Iraq and Syria. Although Turkish troops are not thought to be actively fighting in the offensive in Mosul, they are fighting ISIS on the ground in Syria. Turkey supports the Iraqi Kurdish fighters, but is strongly opposed to Syria’s YPG Kurdish fighters because it claims they are affiliated with Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he would strongly oppose YPG units being involved in the offensive to retake Raqqa.

Despite this, a US-backed rebel group called the Syrian Democratic Forces announced the start of an offensive to retake Raqqa earlier this month named Operation Euphrates Wrath. The SDF are largely made up of Syrian Kurds, though they claim to have Arab fighters also.

It is still not clear if Turkish troops will be directly involved in the fight for Raqqa, and, if so, what role they might play alongside such groups they are so deeply opposed to.

Operation Euphrates Wrath has so far included limited operations far outside Raqqa city, and is not expected to reach Raqqa itself for months. Similarly, when the Iraqi government announced the beginning of the offensive on Mosul in March, it was more than six months before the real push toward the city began. In the intervening time, political agreements were needed among the various groups involved in the fight. Those trying to gather together Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and Americans on the Syrian side will have an even tougher political challenge.

There is undoubtedly also political pressure on men like Major Gubere to keep pushing forward in Mosul. Both Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and US President Barack Obama are eager to claim victory over ISIS, and a fresh push toward the Tigris river is expected in the coming days.

“Hopefully victory is coming soon,” said Major Ehab Razaq, while driving a Humvee away from the front line. “We will liberate all of Iraq, especially the people of Mosul.”

But liberating the people of Mosul will involve the deaths of a tragically high number of them. A similar situation will likely play out in Raqqa as well, as anti-ISIS forces close in. Neither city will be taken without significant bloodshed.

The US and its allies are winning the battle. Winning the war is going to be much harder.

Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour. She has lived in the Middle East for nine years, and is based currently in Beirut, Lebanon.

She took these photos from the front lines in Mosul in November 2016.