Long before their advance stalled around Mosul’s old city, Iraqi forces advanced far quicker than expected towards the city’s western side. And it appears it was much faster than the Nineveh Fire Support Group anticipated.
Abu Ali and his brothers in arms had no time to destroy the material in their hideout. Their grasp of operational security was weak.
A slip of paper discovered on the floor of the farmhouse turns out to be coordinates of locations across Mosul.

Using Google Earth maps, I plot the information. I recognise one location - an IS mortar factory that I had visited in November 2016. The other coordinates are mortar storage and production units too, according to Iraq security forces.
Source: Conflict Monitor by IHS Markit, territory assessed as credible on 19 June 2017

About a dozen men had worked at the factory producing precisely milled mortar shells.
They had burned oil fires through holes in the building roof to hide it from coalition aircraft.

By the time we return to the mortar foundry in April, it is cleared of the shells and returned to commercial use.
Now it is making water tanks and roofing to replace those damaged in the fighting.

In November, people were willing to talk about the IS fighters who made weapons there, but by April, a wariness has settled on east Mosul. Locals may be freed from IS, but it feels like the militants are not very far away. The fear of retribution hangs in the air.
And it becomes easy to understand why when I make my way to the final destination in the journey to retrace the men of the Nineveh Fire Support Group.

In amongst the papers and documents I retrieved from the farmhouse are a number of religious books.
All are marked with the stamp of a mosque in east Mosul - one bearing the name of an imam has been dedicated to the young men.
Mosque of the believers

The Al Mou’meneen Mosque is not far from the mortar factory, and it is here that the group from the farmhouse prayed and brought terror to the local neighbourhood.
The mosque is modest and mostly without adornment. It is a bright spring day, and children are making their way home from school. But I have a sense of trepidation as I knock on the metal door. Is the imam who dedicated the book to the fighters still inside?

The caretaker answers and welcomes me inside. I take off my shoes and he sends a boy to find the imam. I sit waiting in the sunshine, drinking some sweet tea, listening to the children playing outside.
The imam who signed the book is long gone, he fled with IS. So the caretaker calls to find the man who led prayers before IS took control of Mosul.
The imam arrives, his name is Fares Fadel Ibrahim. He is younger than I expected, broad-shouldered and with a quiet confidence.
I show him the pictures of the fighters and he recognises most of them.
Quentin speaks to the imam:
He is nervous, though, and I soon discover why. “Please,” he asks, “Do not film me looking at the pictures.” Why is he afraid of these young men?
The fighters, he says, moved their entire families into this neighbourhood. Most were Iraqi, but there were foreigners, from Syria, Morocco and elsewhere, he says. They lived among them for more than a year and fled in November 2016 when Iraqi security forces advanced closer to the area.
Mullah Fares is, he explains, the temporary imam until the Department of Religious Affairs appoints someone permanently.
That said, it is clear that this is his mosque. He has prayed here since he was a boy - since the mosque was built in 1980. And then he preached there alongside the permanent imam, until IS came.
“What happened to the permanent imam,” I ask. “They murdered him,” he replies. And replaced him with their own preacher - the man who dedicated the book to the fighters. He called them "beloved darlings".

As we sit on the carpet together in the prayer hall, he explains the story of IS in Mosul and his neighbourhood. They corrupted the city, he says, and worse still, the world’s view of Islam.
At first they treated people well, he explains. “They came with respect and appreciation and then their true intentions appeared.”
For IS, the mosques are a means of control and of recruitment.
Mullah Fares was given the option - join IS or stay at home and only return to the mosque he loved, to pray. So, he returned home.
They came in the name of faith, the residents of Mosul love faith, so anybody that comes to us as a person of faith we welcome it. But the reality was one thing and truth was another.”
Fares Fadel Ibrahim
IS set about a purge. Other preachers were accused of being “delaying salafies,” and were imprisoned for a month, or longer. When released they promised never to lead prayer again. Others, like the Al Mou’meneen’s permanent imam, were killed.
Looking at the pictures of the young men from the Nineveh Fire Support Group, Mullah Fares pauses for a moment, then says: “The power is with the person who holds the gun, even if he is very small and young. Like the young men from ISIS [IS] who killed some strong and old men of ours, like the imam here in the mosque, who was killed by children.”

It would soon be time for afternoon prayers and we have to finish the interview. Dozens of curious children are crowded around the mosque’s door, eager to get inside. But before Mullah Fares finishes, he has one more thing to say, about the young men who held this city.
They distorted the image of Islam, and this thinking will remain.”
Fares Fadel Ibrahim
He continues, “My dear brother, we are by nature people who love faith, young or old, we love Islam and Muslims. Even the prophet, while he encouraged invading different places, he ordered his men not to kill a child, a woman, or an old man, and not to cut down one tree. So where were these values of Islam?”
And with that, he stands up and begins the call to prayer. From the sunshine outside, the waiting children burst through the doors and get ready for their lessons.

The three dead fighters on the banks of the Tigris were little more than children. In fact, one was still was a child. The Nineveh Fire Support Group were enthusiastic in their campaign of destruction and terror. They helped turn parts of their city into a ruin, and furthered the corruption of their faith.

Did they die happy, knowing they had served their cause as was asked of them, I wonder.
They died as fighters, but they died as fools. Pity should be reserved for the people they once lived among, who were abused and killed as the young men sacrificed all around them, for their caliphate.
When they left Mullah Fares’ neighbourhood, they said to the people, “You did not take care of the caliphate, so you do not deserve it.”
But the truth of their cause was revealed when IS went into homes and destroyed them, killing families. IS and the Nineveh Fire Support Group had no love for Mosul nor its people. The young fighters were willing recruits, but they were also manipulated.
Quentin studies the photos:
As I retrace their steps through Mosul, the thing that strikes me most of all is their youth. It surprised almost everyone we spoke to. For IS, a fighter is anyone above the age of 15, but some of their recruits are much younger.
IS has had support in Mosul, but it inflated that support by weaponising children. Taking the young and the gullible and sacrificing them for its malicious cause.
In Mosul, IS is on the brink of defeat. The bodies by the riverbank are gone - carried away by dogs and other animals.
There is no longer any trace there of the young men. But their legacy of turmoil and destruction remains. It stretches far beyond Mosul, and far beyond the flow of the River Tigris.