Hacker Cinema
Mosul
الموصل
2019 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan
When ISIS took their homes, families and city, one group of men fought to take it all back. Based on true events, this is the story of the Nineveh SWAT team, a renegade police unit who waged a guerrilla operation against ISIS in a desperate struggle to save their home city of Mosul.
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1 comment on Hacker News
There are always people who go through mental contortions to justify to themselves that their own side is spotless. However, in this case there is a common and much more valid objection that the framing is hypocritical, or at least based on a different and much less appealing set of standards than the implied "attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime and humanity must unite to punish whoever engages in it".
Consider for example Mosul after the US-led campaign to recapture it in 2016 (https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2018/4/29/mosul-post-isil-a-city-struggling-to-rebuild), which looks as devastated as any fought-over city in Ukraine; NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 (https://balkaninsight.com/2012/06/11/nato-99-bombing-in-pictures/), which seems to be well on par with Russia's bombing of Ukraine's backline cities in this war; and indeed Ukraine's own bombing of Donetsk since 2014 (referred to in words at https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-idUKKBN0GK12020140820, and captured on video in a documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovKkDvAU9Y) that mostly seemed to be criticised only based on the author's politics).
In all of these cases, the criticism of the invasion itself was already much more ambivalent in Western society - I went to a protest against the Iraq war in 2003 as a schoolkid in Germany, and was accused of "childish anti-Americanism" for it by a teacher - and the attendant destruction was nearly universally shrugged off as somewhere between "sad, but that's just how war is" and "to save this city we had to destroy it". Suggestions that the US government or its allies should face repercussions or even a war crimes trial were widely dismissed as far-left ravings (and one should not forget that when this was actually tried, they sanctioned the ICC (https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-why-has-the-icc-excluded-the-us-from-war-crimes-probe/a-59367096)). Considering that the remedy for this particular case of violence implicitly suggested by the authors of OP's website seems to be to militarily empower the US and its allies further, I think the moral case being made looks rather less clear-cut.