Inside an Elite Iraqi Special Ops Unit | Hunting ISIS (full documentary) | FRONTLINE (Aired 2017)
December 30, 2025
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21:34Now PlayingInside an Elite Iraqi Special Ops Unit | Hunting ISIS (full documentary) | FRONTLINE (Aired 2017)
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as posted by the channelInside an elite special operations unit that was at the center of the fight against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq. (Aired 2017)
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In “Hunting ISIS,” FRONTLINE went deep inside the brutal fight to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS, following members of Iraq’s elite special operations forces, known as the Golden Division. Director Olivier Sarbil spent six weeks embedded with the 1st Battalion, a Golden Division unit that had been at the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS and was trying to clear ISIS fighters from the city, street by street and house by house.
Intense and up-close, the documentary showed that it was not a clear-cut task. Although many Iraqi civilians had fled Mosul, as many as a million still lived within the besieged city, which made it difficult for the soldiers to tell who was a civilian, and who was an ISIS fighter. And as the film reported, Mosul’s civilian population was fearful of the Iraqi Army’s reputation for sectarian abuses and illegal detentions.
The film offered a haunting, on-the-ground look at life deep within a war zone — and a dramatic portrait of the complexities of the fight against ISIS in Mosul.
The producer and director of “Hunting ISIS” is Olivier Sarbil. The senior producers are Dan Edge and James Jones.
Explore additional reporting related to “Hunting ISIS” on our website:
#Documentary #ISIS #Iraq #Mosul
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