When the Dutch journalist Judit Neurink and her friends heard of the takeover of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from her base in Irbil (or Erbil), the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, they were surprised. Neurink, a Middle East specialist and editor of one of the leading Dutch daily papers, Trouw in Amsterdam, moved to Irbil in 2008. During the time she spent there, apart from reporting, she set up a media centre to train journalists and teach politicians and the police how to work with the media. She wrote her sixth book, The Women of the Caliphate, which described life inside ISIS territory, published in 2016. Yet, she had been as shocked as anyone when ISIS occupied Mosul, just 50 miles from Irbil and only 250 miles from Baghdad, on June 10, 2014.
Within two days, and with only an estimated 1,500 fighters, ISIS had overrun Iraq’s second-largest city, with a population of about one-and-a-half million people. The Iraqi troops simply melted away. It was hardly a fight.
