On March 2, military officials presented their findings for validation, as part of the Pentagon’s “deliberate targeting” process, which - as opposed to the rapid process of targeting in the heat of battle - required vetting at multiple levels and stages across the U.S.-led coalition. Weeks before, Delta Force commandos had captured a high-ranking operative in ISIS’ burgeoning chemical-weapons program, and the information he provided interrogators led military officials to a chemical-weapons production plant in Yabisat observers had been studying the site for weeks, by way of surveillance flights. None of them knew that their Iraqi neighborhood was at that moment in the cross hairs of the American military. All told, there were 21 people around the table. Sawsan had been staying with her grandparents for a week when the whole family sat down to dinner on March 5, 2016.
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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Zeidan’s other daughter moved into an apartment on the other side of Mosul with her husband and their six children, but one of them, 11-year-old Sawsan, preferred to spend her time across town in Yabisat: She was attached to her grandparents and loved playing with her cousins. Araj’s brother, Abdul Aziz Ahmed Araj, lived nearby in a small, crowded apartment. Zeidan’s daughter Ghazala was married to a man named Muhammad Ahmed Araj, who grew up in the neighborhood. Though ISIS had taken Mosul, parts of the city were still relatively safe. They moved into a storage facility, divided it up into separate rooms, brought in a water tank, built a kitchen and a bathroom. The family had avoided the camps for internally displaced people, where they would have faced a constant risk of separation, and found their way instead to the city, to a grimy industrial neighborhood called Yabisat. Their longtime home in a nearby village, Wana, had been taken by ISIS, then retaken by Kurdish pesh merga forces, and - as if that were not enough - it stood just seven miles below the crumbling Mosul Dam, which engineers had long warned might soon collapse, creating a deluge that would kill everyone in its path. For Ali Fathi Zeidan and his extended family, West Mosul was in 2016 still the best of many bad options.