One evening three years ago, Ayad, a former Iraqi army officer, took a call from a contact who not long before had been a mortal foe. The man on the phone was a shepherd from a town that had been a stronghold of the Islamic State terror group, and he had some information to share.
For years, the shepherd had been an IS member, a resident of the hardline town of Baaj who had been swept up in the marauders’ 2014 rampage across northern Iraq and in the blood-soaked bedlam that followed. Tending his flock had given him a unique vantage point on the extremists as they consolidated a stranglehold on Mosul province, and then, when the region slipped from their grasp, as the resurgent national army and global coalition fought back.
