Cockburn’s essay, appearing in the London Review of Books, is a sharp, heartbreaking look at the battle over the Iraq city of Mosul (“Endtimes in Mosul“).

He tells the story by detailing the situation of one man and his family.

His column begins:

On 22 May, Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left his house in the Islamic State-controlled western part of Mosul to try to escape across the Tigris to the government-held eastern side of the city. He and his mother, along with ten other people, carried rubber tyres down to the river: most of them couldn’t swim, and they planned to tie them together to make a raft. The siege of Mosul was in its seventh month and Ahmed was both desperate and starving: he and his mother were living on handfuls of wheat they cooked, though he said it made him feel sick. His friends believe that lack of food made him light-headed and led him to risk crossing the river. ‘Even if I die in the river,’ he told them, ‘it will be better than living here.’

Needless to say, this didn’t end well.

I’ll let you read the rest, which is currently available for free on the London Review’s normally subscription-only site.

Cockburn learned about Ahmed Monsen through a personal contact who lived across the Tigris River from Mosul, and who was able to establish a poor but workable telephone connection with Monsen during a period when the pace of the fighting prevented IS from continuing its total crackdown on private communications. Cockburn relayed questions through his friend, who then gathered replies from Monsen.

The bleak assessment of the situation of civilians in the wake of the scorched earth battle is difficult to read. You immediately are struck by how little reporting of the continuing war in Iraq we are getting, and how our military strategy, such as it is, fails to protect noncombatants.

And now, with the U.S. again planning to increase troops in Afghanistan, it looks like another expansion of a mostly invisible war that we will “see” only through limited eyes.