Original subtitles

For over six months, the fight against ISIS in Iraq

has been reaching its tipping point,

with a massive operation to regain control of the city of Mosul.

Three years ago, US trained coalition forces

surrendered Iraq's second-largest city to ISIS fighters,

and it's been the epicenter of the militant group's operations in Iraq ever since.

To see what the battle against ISIS looks like on the front lines,

we sent Aris Roussinos to embed with Iraqi forces

as they began their assault on ISIS's last stronghold in Iraq.

Dawn's breaking, and the long-awaited offensive

to liberate Mosul has just begun.

The Peshmerga are pushing through the berm

that separates their territory from that of ISIS.

The plan is to push ahead, liberate a few villages on the road there.

The offensive continues a grueling two-year campaign

by Iraqi and Kurdish troops

that stretched hundreds of miles northwest

from the suburbs of Baghdad to surround Mosul.

Fire!

As soon as the offensive started,

ISIS sent suicide bombers to target Iraqi forces,

and set oil reserves aflame in an attempt to defend their hold on the city.

We followed along with the Iraqi Army's 9th Armored Division,

as it assaulted ISIS-held villages on their path.

The Iraqi Army have been held up at this village for the past couple of days.

They were complaining about the lack of air support from the coalition,

but since we've been here, within in the past 10 minutes,

two Iraqi Air Force helicopters, helicopter gunships, have come in,

and it's been hammering the village with rockets.

But ISIS counterattacked,

exploding a mortar just a few feet away from us

and striking a BMP vehicle with a missile, killing one of its crew.

We're up at the forwardmost front-line position facing ISIS on the road towards Mosul.

Get down!

The situation remained tense

as the unit faced constant gunfire

and debated whether or not their captive was an ISIS fighter.

One of the soldiers blamed the prisoner

for the death of his friend,

and he was taken away for interrogation, away from the cameras.

Despite the confident tone and modern American weaponry,

the Iraqi Army appeared poorly organized for the battle ahead.

As the Iraqi Army pushed forward,

they began stabilizing the retaken area.

Since we've been here, the Iraqi armored units

have been able to take towns and villages but not hold them.

They need an infantry to do that.

Tasked with securing the retaken town of Qaraqosh,

Colonel Omar Ali allowed us to follow,

as the army took stock of the destruction.

This is the... the main church, the cathedral.

Prior to the ISIS takeover, this church was the largest in Iraq,

summoning over 3,000 Christians to mass every Sunday.

This is the altar of the cathedral. You can see an icon there.

They've obviously replaced it in the past few days since they recaptured it.

But while some were celebrating their return home,

many more were still fleeing the violence.

Colonel Ali and his troops move north to Karemlash,

continuing their mission of securing sites recaptured from ISIS.

ISIS dug a vast web of interconnecting tunnels

to hide from air strikes and surprise Iraqi forces,

a strategy that allowed them to hold the region for as long as they did.

You can see they've actually got a professional boring machine hidden away here

that ISIS have used to dig this extensive network of tunnels

that crisscrosses the entire front line.

It all looks quite chaotic,

but it's actually deadly serious work.

We don't know if the excavator is mined.

What's obvious when you see this is the level of sophistication of these tunnels,

of the equipment ISIS are using.

The closer we get to Mosul, the more sophisticated the tunnels will be

and the longer it will take to clear them.

We just arrived in the recently recaptured village of Ali Rash, just outside Mosul,

with one of the generals commanding this division.

It's a bit of a press tour. Most of the Iraqi TV crews

are being taken on a kind of PR tour.

There's a few ISIS bodies scattered around.

An Iraqi media officer is leading Iraqi journalists

on a tour of ISIS corpses,

uh, rotting around the courtyard of a school here.

We're now in the suburbs of Mosul.

You can hear an exchange of fire, incoming and outgoing.

Okay.

Uh, when... Man: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ah-ah-ah.

So, this is pretty much the first house in Mosul

to be taken over by the Iraqi Army.

The civilian inside has been living here the whole time.

He doesn't want to be interviewed because he says his family

still live just further on inside what is still ISIS territory.

As troops closed in on the city,

it became clear that the situation was more precarious than expected.

Districts they had claimed to have liberated

were still vulnerable to ISIS counterattacks.

It didn't take long until we found ourselves in a similar situation.

We came under heavy ISIS fire and we've basically

been trapped here for the past few hours.

It's getting dark now, our press trip to the front line

has basically gone wrong. We're still trapped here.

The generals are also trapped here,

uh, trying to work out how we're going to get out, essentially.

It's not an ideal situation.

Ultimately, the generals decided to wait for the cover of night to attempt to retreat.

We're making a mad dash through the desert,

lights off, bumper-to-bumper,

just trying to not attract ISIS fire

as we crawl our way back to the relative safety of Ali Rash.

On the road back, we came across an encampment of Mosul residents,

fleeing the violence and desperate for an end to the conflict.

Hundreds of thousands have been displaced since the offensive began in October.

As coalition forces make gains in liberating Mosul,

and pushing ISIS out of Iraq,

the looming question is, "What will be left behind?"

The toll on the nation's decimated infrastructure and weakened state

has ensured Iraq will remain unstable for the foreseeable future.

The battle for Mosul

and the purging of the Islamic State from Iraq,

brings up the question of what the country will actually look like

fully liberated.

Now, Iraq has one of the youngest populations of any country in the world,

with 50 percent of Iraqis under 19.

That means that the majority of the people living there today

have grown up knowing nothing but war

and the chaos that followed the ousting of Saddam Hussein.

This exact situation brought about the growth of the Islamic State in Iraq

in the first place.

So we sent Isobel Yeung to Baghdad

to find out what the future looks like

for a lost generation of young Iraqis.

What's it like to drive a bus around Baghdad?

Did you go to school?

Sixteenyear-old Haider works part-time as a bus driver,

even though he doesn't yet have his license.

And you've been driving since you were 15? No one's stopped you?

It sounds quite risky. What's the point? Why are you still doing it?

Iraq's economy is in shambles.

When Haider isn't driving a bus,

he's doing what hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men

fighting.

For the last two years, Haider has fought with a local Shia militia

against IS.

And he's about to head back out to the front lines.

This is your room?

It's not what I imagined for a fighter's room.

I love your little Care Bears up here.

Do you miss it when you're not here?

Have you ever killed someone?

Have you lost any friends?

Oh, this is your friend who died?

How do you feel looking at these photos?

Hmm.

Wow.

Oh, my God. What's that?

Why do you like to take photos of the heads?

Oh, my God. That's pretty gruesome.

Why did you take this photo?

You don't mind your son having these photos on his phone?

Do you feel like he's missing out on anything

by going off to fight at such a young age?

One of the country's most tragic casualties

to the disruption of war

is the nation's once-thriving education system.

Under the dictatorship of Saddam,

schools were secular and free.

Primary school enrollment was nearly a hundred percent.

But since the fighting began in 2003,

there have been tens of thousands

of education-related attacks,

forcing one out of every five schools to close.

Over the last 15 years, the city of Fallujah

has seen some of the worst violence in Iraq.

We went there to see one of the only schools that's been reopened

since the area was reclaimed from Islamic State.

Iraq used to have one of the best

education systems in the Arab world,

and now over a third of the kids in the country are out of school

and not receiving any education at all.

This is actually one of the more fortunate schools.

You can see, it's still been pretty badly hit.

There are hundreds of students studying here,

crammed into tiny little classrooms.

The teachers are saying that they don't have enough text books,

they don't have enough chairs for the kids to sit on,

and then they haven't received any government support or funding.

As more and more students show up at what's left of the school,

the headmistress is scrambling to accommodate as many as she can.

Is it good to be back at school?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More than a million school-age children

have been displaced since the rise of the Islamic State.

How long have you been at this school for?

Why did you have to leave this town?

Even for the students who are lucky enough

to get some form of an education,

there are few opportunities once they finish school.

For younger adults, the unemployment rate is estimated at almost 40 percent.

Iraqi youth are so disillusioned with the situation,

that thousands have taken to the streets in protest.

In 2016, demonstrators stormed the heavily guarded government green zone,

demanding reforms.

Months later, the protests in Baghdad are still going on.

We're just in Tahrir Square, where, for years now,

hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters

have been showing up every single Friday

to express their dissatisfaction

with corruption, with lack of jobs,

with a million different grievances

that young people here in Iraq have.

Billions of dollars have disappeared from Iraq's economy

due to corruption under Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki,

who the US helped put in power.

Even now that Maliki's gone, the economy is in worse shape than ever,

and corruption is still rampant.

To find out how top officials are answering to these youth-led protests,

we met with Iraq's minister of youth.

Every Friday still, hundreds of protesters gather in Tahrir Square.

There's so much anger amongst young people

towards politicians like yourself.

Do you feel at all guilty that you're sat here on this throne,

earning one of the best salaries in the country?

What's at stake here if the situation

doesn't turn around for young people in Iraq?

What does the future of the country look like?

But there are certain groups who have something to gain

from the discontent sweeping across Iraq.

Sectarian militias, divided across religious and political lines,

are recruiting at an alarming rate.

We went to one front line with a Suni militia leader,

whose ranks are filled with disenfranchised young men,

eager to join the fight against ISIS.

What's happening?

Woo! Yeah.

Did that feel good?

Do you often shoot the river?

What were you doing before that?

What would you be doing if you weren't fighting?

So you never went to school?

How much longer do you think you'll be fighting for?

What do you think your country will be like once ISIS has left?

Do you guys fight with any Shia militia?

The sheikh doesn't agree?

Some of these men are pretty young.

What were you doing when you were their age?

Quite a different life to the life that these young guys have.

You've only recently recruited these men.

Was it easy to encourage them to join up?

Once ISIS is eradicated, do you think that that's it?

Or do you think that there might be more tension between Shia and Sunni militias?

It would seem that the stage is already set

for the next sectarian war,

once Islamic State is gone.

To make matters worse,

religious leaders on both sides are escalating the call to war

amongst ever-younger and impressionable kids.

In 2014, Shia religious clerics issued fatwas

that made it a religious duty for even children to take up arms.

We met with one of the clerics responsible

in the Shia city of Najaf.

You yourself have issued a fatwa

to encourage young men to go and fight.

Some of the people who are going off to fight

are just boys. I've seen some of them.

Do you think that they can fully comprehend

the magnitude of what they're getting themselves into?

You say it's easy for you, but I also met the families

of young boys who are heading out to fight,

and I don't think it would be easy for them.

You are talking about young people like they're almost disposable.

Is any age too young to go and fight, do you think?

Do you have any sons?

Do they fight?

It's quite convenient, though, that you are asking other people's children

to go and fight and not asking your own.

While more and more discontented youth pour into the militias,

the toll has already been staggering.

Some estimate that more than a million Iraqis

have been killed since 2003.

We're just in Najaf's cemetery,

which is one of the largest cemeteries in the world.

Literally, as far as you can see, it's just millions of graves.

Looking at these photos, everyone is so young.

This whole area is cordoned off for volunteers like Haider.

Several of his friends are buried here.

We visited the grave of Haider's friend, Alawi,

who was recently killed in battle.

How old was he when he died?

How many of your friends are buried here?

And how many more of your friends do you think you'll be burying?

Do you ever wish that you grew up somewhere else

and you didn't have to go and fight in Iraq?