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Hard to over-emphasize the hostility toward ISIS in Iraq after the atrocities they committed. The major city of Mosul was demolished - like nothing since WWII. It was literally the largest urban battle since Stalingrad.

The viciousness and cruelty of ISIS was also epic. People were so traumatized by by this horrific abuse, that many, many men of military age have gone way down the road of what we would consider war crimes, for revenge, and out of conditioned bloodlust from all their experience. They tend to be emotional people, and those things would shatter most anyone.

I remember one guy who interviewed a Western reporter. All his brothers had been killed by ISIS, one of them in in a gory video where they sawed his head off with a hunting knife while he was alive. ISIS found his email or phone number, and sent him the video.

He killed every ISIS captive they took, mostly by cutting their heads off. If they were thrown off a roof, shot or beaten to death, he would cut off their head afterward. He was over fifty heads at the time, about half of them live. He said that he knew it was a crime, but did not care about being filmed, because he saw nothing in his future except death.

During the battle in Mosul, it became standard across the front to make sure the foreign jihadis died on the battlefield, whether the hands were up or not (they could have had a suicide vest after all). A lot of the ISIS women were allowed to live at the time, in the fog of war, but it seems that they are getting around to deliberately cleaning up what’s left.