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This week, on the season finale of Vice:

the dramatic fall of ISIS in Iraq.

He just got shot through the shin,

running across this... this street.

And then, the child soldiers

ISIS left behind.

How many other boys were you with?

All your age?

Do you think that he'll ever be able to forget

what he's been through?

Go, go, go!

We are not animals!

Ever since ISIS first swept across Syria

and Iraq three years ago,

they have dominated the international news cycle.

And over the last ten months, they have faded from headlines,

as they continue to lose physical territory in the region,

including where they first declared the caliphate,

Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul.

For the past year, Vice has been on the ground,

reporting on what actually happens

as the caliphate fails.

So, we've been told that at least two soldiers were killed today

and were just carried out, and dozens were injured.

The battle for Mosul lasted almost a year.

Its outcome will have global repercussions,

defining the future of Iraq and ISIS.

It's the biggest city in their territory,

and ISIS held it for three years.

Someone who knows this all too well

is Dr. David Kilcullen,

the former senior advisor

to General David Petraeus

and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Battle of Mosul is...

the largest urban battle

that we've seen anywhere on the planet since the Second World War.

And I think people will be studying

what happens when you fight a modern war

with satellites and drones and smart phones

and IEDs, in an ancient city

that still has 1.2 million people living in it.

What are the ISIS fighters saying

to people who might want to flee?

And they would do this in front of everybody,

even in front of the children?

We rejoined the Iraqi security forces

as they prepared for the final push against ISIS in Western Mosul.

As they moved forwards,

clearing one building at a time,

terrified families fled,

knowing they could be killed at any moment.

It's just... shells like that are just landing...

sometimes every few minutes.

This is what clearing an area looks like.

Not only is there not a building that's not pretty much destroyed,

there's not even a window or a door

that isn't completely destroyed.

So you can imagine what it's like

for the something like 200,000 civilians

who are living in the Old City over there.

So this is... as far forward as they've been so far.

And it's not far from here to the Old City,

which is probably where ISIS

is gonna be forced to make their,

their last stand.

So they're really trapped in a very, very...

small area now.

The sniper, who pushed them back,

is now getting shots into this building,

which is their base. This is where they sleep.

So, they're now having to circle around the back of their own base

to, um, avoid the sniper fire. That's a seriously bad sign.

Oh!

That was the airstrike they've been calling for for about the last hour.

I think it hit the school, where they think there were ten ISIS fighters

who were the ones who were shooting very actively down the street.

They were saying that once the airstrike hit,

they were gonna then storm the school.

Amidst the chaos, the Iraqi soldier who fired the rocket

has killed three of his own men.

Every day was the same.

The fighting never stopped,

and the soldiers barely slept.

Go, go, go, go, go, go!

The plan now is to clear

all of these buildings up to the river.

And that would cut off the hospital from the Old City.

Take the hospital, and then all that's left of the Old City.

But there was a church and a mosque side-by-side here?

So this is the... the Tigris River just here.

There's an Iraqi flag in front of us.

Another Iraqi flag here.

So, they've... they've made it,

they've pushed all the way to the river,

and separated the hospital from the Old City,

which means however many fighters are left in the hospital

are now cut off and completely surrounded.

So it's taking much longer than everyone thought.

It's much harder than everyone thought,

but very slowly, bit by bit, building by building,

they're, uh, they're taking Mosul.

The prime minister came sounding triumphant.

In the heart of a free and liberated Mosul, he said:

"We announce absolute victory."

What was the cost to Mosul, the city,

and the civilian population of Mosul?

There are still bodies under the rubble in some parts of the city.

There's, if you like, a societal level

of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

of people there that lived through ISIS

and then lived through the fighting,

and now are going back and trying to rebuild their lives.

If, you know, key leaders are killed,

and if key terrain is held by the Iraqi security forces,

what do you think ISIS becomes?

This is the point at which we need to be asking ourselves

whether there's a better way, or a different way.

I mean, we've been fighting these guys for 15 years.

Hundreds of billions of dollars,

if not trillions of dollars, into the fight.

We've lost 8,000 people just from the US military alone.

Probably half a million civilians have been killed in that time,

and now we are dealing with not one,

but two global terrorist organizations,

each of which is as big as Al Qaeda was on 9/11.

Do you think we've made the situation,

not just worse, but twice as bad?

At least twice as bad. We now have,

groups that are operating in something like 70 countries.

We've got a really significant threat in Europe

which didn't exist on 9/11.

I don't think we're gonna deal effectively with this

in a matter of months or years.

This is a generational thing, and I know it's depressing to say that,

but I think we're probably closer to the beginning

than we are to the end.

ISIS has lost the physical battle in Mosul,

but the hardest part may have just begun.

Because now, as ISIS and other extremist groups

splinter and diffuse into international terrorist organizations,

there is a growing concern

that a larger problem is at hand,

as people who were indoctrinated by the group,

especially children,

are now re-entering society.

Isobel Yeung went to report on this burgeoning story

in the aftermath of the fall of ISIS in Iraq.

The city of Mosul has been liberated,

but rebuilding remains an enormous task.

We sat down with Governor Hammadi,

who's responsible for this entire province,

and whose job it is to oversee the reconstruction efforts.

What is the situation in Mosul right now?

Finding these ISIS sympathizers is a daunting task.

The fighting has caused

mass displacement throughout the country,

with the Battle of Mosul alone

forcing almost one million Iraqis

to flee their homes.

Thousands more continue to seek refuge.

These guys have just arrived in the camp from Tal Afar,

which is an ISIS-controlled area nearby.

This is one of several IDP camps

that have been set up in the last couple of months

to deal with the huge influx of people arriving

from ISIS-controlled areas all around here.

A lot of the children and a lot of their families

have lived under ISIS control for several years.

Many of these children exhibit signs of PTSD

after spending their formative years growing up under ISIS.

Like this 15-year-old, who agreed to speak with us

under the condition that we hid his identity

for fear of ISIS retaliation within the camp.

Do you remember what it was like

when Daesh first got to your town?

You watched that happening?

How did you feel when you were watching those things?

Did they ever try to...

convince you to go to their schools,

or to go to their training camps?

This is a crucial part of ISIS strategy.

They recruit so-called "Cubs of the Caliphate"

to train and fight with them.

And most importantly, for the next generation

to be ready to support and spread the ideology

of the Islamic State.

We met Dr. Anne Speckhard, a psychologist

and director of the International Center

for the Study of Violent Extremism,

who has interviewed hundreds of terrorists

around the world and in Iraq.

The government of Iraq

says that there's half-a-million youth

that lived in ISIS territories.

The half-million youth

probably have been exposed to a lot of violence.

ISIS were the only people

that continued to send their kids to school.

In the schools we had the ISIS ideology,

we had kids learning how to behead.

There were at least 5,000 Iraqi kids

that were in the Cubs of the Caliphate,

and if they went into the Cubs of the Caliphate,

they were indoctrinated to be suicide bombers,

to be so-called martyrs.

ISIS, more than any other group,

was really good at cult indoctrination.

It is an overwhelming and daunting task,

to address this entire generation

that lived under ISIS.

Many of the so-called Cubs of the Caliphate

are currently being detained.

Salaam.

We visited one of the prisons

where suspected ISIS members are being held.

Access to these cells is highly restricted,

so we filmed covertly to show the conditions inside.

Are you guys sleeping and living in here?

Are there any kids in here?

This final room we visited was so dark,

it can't fully be seen here,

but it contained more than a hundred people, who were so tightly packed

that they had to stand or sit hugging their knees.

What are you all here for?

How long have you guys been in here for?

We were permitted to film with a child soldier,

who joined ISIS at 13,

and who's been locked away here for the last two months.

Why were you arrested?

How many other boys were you with?

And they were all your age?

Do you understand why

so many of your fellow Iraqis

would never want you

to come back into Iraqi society?

They're scared that you're a threat to the community.

We saw the scale of destruction firsthand

when we visited what was the epicenter

of ISIS' stronghold in Iraq.

We're just entering the Old City of Mosul

with the civilian defense unit.

All these guys in the back of this van

are searching for their family members,

as they have been for the last few days.

Wow.

Oh, my gosh.

Whoa. What happened?

Who... Who shot him?

Were there any Daesh people living in this neighborhood?

You're not gonna move the bodies of Daesh?

This poor kid is just desperately trying

to make sense of this pile of rubble,

searching for his father and his sister,

that are somewhere amongst this.

For the millions of people who lived under ISIS,

they faced horrific suffering.

Now, many Iraqis

are understandably hungry for revenge.

So, what was this like when ISIS was here?

Did you lose any family members while ISIS was here?

Do you know what happened to him?

Are there many ISIS families living here?

Sorry, one second.

Who is this guy?

Fear and suspicion are rampant

over who may or may not be

an ISIS sympathizer, or even a sleeper cell.

Anyone who was involved with the group

is now a potential target of retaliation.

At the age of 14,

this boy says he attended an ISIS training camp for just over a month,

and then spent the next several years

hiding from them.

When his city was liberated,

he told us that Iraqi authorities captured him,

later releasing him from prison

and clearing him of all charges.

But the stigma of being a Cub of the Caliphate is lasting.

He now continues to live in hiding.

What I don't understand is that

you'd heard about Daesh before they got here.

You were scared of them.

They came here, they took over your town,

they closed your schools.

And yet you still wanted to join them.

Can you explain that?

You're now not welcome in your own hometown.

Do you feel angry at all about that situation,

and about people not wanting you here?

These fears are not unfounded.

We met with the family of a village elder

who was murdered just days earlier.

While we can't confirm that it was a revenge attack,

we were told that his sons are imprisoned

for alleged affiliations with ISIS,

and he himself advocated that former ISIS families

be reintegrated back into the community.

I heard that your husband was quite outspoken,

because he was saying that Daesh families

should be welcomed back.

Do you think that that is maybe why he was targeted?

Some of these children are now returning to their families

after years apart.

Hi, buddy.

We visited Tomas, an 11-year-old Yazidi boy

who was rescued from ISIS three weeks earlier.

The Yazidis are an ethnic and religious minority

despised by ISIS.

They executed thousands of them,

took women and girls as sex slaves,

and kidnapped young boys to fight for them,

all of which the UN says amounts to a genocide.

Is this the first family meal since he got back?

When Tomas was just eight years old,

a group of ISIS fighters stopped his family's car.

I win.

They kidnapped him, his sisters, and his cousins,

and he spent the next three years being forced to fight.

How did you hurt yourself?

That must have been really scary. Were you scared?

Do you think that he'll ever be able to forget

what he's been through?

Are you getting any support at all from the government?

Or is Tomas getting any kind of psychosocial support?

Any rehabilitation programs that are available to him?

There's a lot of Iraqi people

who don't feel very comfortable

with children like Tomas,

who has been living under ISIS and training under ISIS

for the last three years,

to be back in Iraqi society.

Is that a concern of yours at all?

We now have an entire generation

that's grown up knowing nothing but war.

The turmoil we witnessed is a painful legacy

of the power vacuum created by the Iraq war.

When we look at Iraq, we have to remember

that we have an entire society that's traumatized.

They've lived through war since 2003.

Before that, they were living under Saddam.

If we treat the kids that could be rehabilitated,

we'll see less likelihood of ISIS re-emerging.

This is a problem that you can't kill your way out of.

With ISIS now on the verge of defeat,

a new void exists.

What do you think your future looks like?

Until desperately needed

rehabilitation programs are established,

exposure to radical ideologies

and violence

leave the youth of Iraq

more vulnerable than ever before.