Mosul, the 2019 Arabic-language war film streaming on Netflix, is being called by viewers the best urban warfare movie since Black Hawk Down and The Hurt Locker. The film, written and directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan, follows a renegade Iraqi SWAT team during the 2016 battle to retake the city from ISIS. Five years after its release on the platform, a fresh wave of audience reviews on IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and social media is calling it a “masterpiece” and a “hidden gem” that captures modern urban combat with unusual authenticity.
Carnahan’s debut premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in September 2019 and arrived on Netflix on November 26, 2020. It was produced by Joe and Anthony Russo’s AGBO alongside Image Nation and Condé Nast Entertainment. Critics largely agreed with the new audience verdict at the time, but the film has spent most of its streaming life under the radar. The current rediscovery, which began surfacing in viewer posts in late 2025, is the moment a small-budget combat film finally met the audience it was built for.
What Mosul Is and Where It Came From
Mosul is a 101-minute Arabic-language war action film shot in Iraqi Arabic. It was produced by Joe and Anthony Russo (the directors of Avengers: Endgame and two Captain America films) through their AGBO banner, with Mike Larocca, Jeremy Steckler, and Dawn Ostroff also producing. Mauro Fiore was the cinematographer, with Philip Ivey on production design. The film was shot in Marrakesh, Morocco, which stood in for war-ravaged northern Iraq. The score is by Henry Jackman.
The screenplay was adapted from Luke Mogelson’s 2017 article “the 2017 article that inspired Mosul,” published in The New Yorker on February 6, 2017. Mogelson’s piece embedded with the Nineveh SWAT team in the weeks before the Iraqi government launched its final offensive on the city. The film preserves the article’s central unit and most of its structure. Carnahan is a screenwriter known for The Kingdom and Deepwater Horizon, and the brother of filmmaker Joe Carnahan. Mosul is his directorial debut.
The cast is led by Suhail Dabbach, who plays Major Jasem, the commander of the Nineveh SWAT team. The supporting cast includes Is’haq Elias as Waleed, Adam Bessa as the rookie Kawa, Hayat Kamille, Thaer Al-Shayei, Ahmad Elghanem, and Waleed Elgadi. None of the principal actors were widely known to Western audiences before the film.
- Suhail Dabbach as Major Jasem
- Is’haq Elias as Waleed
- Adam Bessa as Kawa
- Hayat Kamille as Hayat
- Thaer Al-Shayei as Hooka
- Ahmad Elghanem as Sinan
- Waleed Elgadi as Colonel Kaveh Esfahani
A Rookie Cop Joins a Renegade SWAT in Mosul
The film opens during a 2016 ISIS ambush on a Mosul café, where three Iraqi policemen are pinned down by insurgents. Kawa, a 21-year-old Feyli Kurd who has just lost his uncle in the fight, is rescued by the Nineveh SWAT team. The unit is unofficial, made up of Mosul natives whose families have been hunted by ISIS. Because Kawa has lost a relative to the group, he qualifies to join the squad. He accepts on the spot.
From the moment Kawa joins, the unit gives him only one rule: follow the commander, do not ask about the mission. Over a single day, the squad pushes deeper into ISIS-held blocks, trading gunfire, drone strikes, and bartered cigarettes for ammunition from a local militia commander. Waleed leads the team through escalating fights: clearing a sniper’s roof, surviving an explosive-laden drone, killing a traitor in the ranks. The squad finally assaults an ISIS camp where several members’ own families are being held captive.
By the time Kawa realizes what the Nineveh SWAT team has actually been doing, he has lost a friend to friendly fire. He has taken shrapnel to the face and watched Major Jasem step on a hidden booby trap. The film ends not with a victory parade but with the survivors, six men out of nine, continuing into another building. There is no clean wrap. The next block of Mosul is just the next block.
The Critics Were Ahead of the Audience
The 2019 Venice Film Festival review in a festival review of Mosul noted the film’s “remarkable” embedded perspective on the battle, drawn directly from Mogelson’s reporting. Variety’s review, also from Venice, called the film “well-crafted, exciting but familiar.” The same review praised Dabbach’s “Terence Stamp-ish charisma” as Major Jasem. Variety also singled out Mauro Fiore’s “fervent, explosive handheld cinematography” for giving the combat scenes an “undeniable visceral impact” in a 2019 review of the Mosul action. Variety pushed back on the film’s Hollywood plotting, writing that the movie “often feels like Call of Duty interrupted by the occasional call to prayer.”
On Rotten Tomatoes, Mosul holds an 84% approval rating across 32 critic reviews, with an average score of 7.30/10. The site’s critics’ consensus reads: “With a fresh perspective to balance the familiar Middle Eastern war violence, Mosul hits its targets forcefully.” Metacritic gives it a weighted average of 71 out of 100 from five critics, a “generally favorable” score. Neither platform’s critic number is the kind of stratosphere score that drives a movie onto year-end lists, which is part of why the film’s audience rediscovery, not its critical one, is the story.
One line in the Variety review captures the film’s tension with itself. Major Jasem, the Iraqi character, tells Kawa that “we don’t talk about American intervention anymore, we’re past all that.” The line is delivered in Arabic by an Iraqi actor in a film produced by the Russo Brothers and distributed by Netflix. Variety describes the arrangement as “an example of American cultural intervention” that remains “outwardly respectful of Iraqi ownership of this particular war wound.” Mosul is, on its own terms, a war movie that argues against American war movies, while still using their grammar.
- Rotten Tomatoes: 84% critic approval, 7.30 out of 10 average
- Metacritic: 71 out of 100 (5 critics)
- Runtime: 101 minutes
- Critics’ consensus: “hits its targets forcefully”
The Audience Verdict That Took Five Years
The viewer reaction that has surfaced in late 2025 and into 2026 reads like a single chorus. On IMDb, one review posted in December 2025 says: “The BEST war movie since Black Hawk Down! Amazing! Authentic and a true story!” Another calls it “the best movie about urban warfare, post Black Hawk Down” and a “hidden gem on Netflix.” The word “authentic” appears in nearly every long review.
Several viewers compare the combat to Saving Private Ryan. “I cannot say enough good things about this movie. What a powerful movie. The fight scenes are better than in Saving Private Ryan,” one reviewer wrote. Another wrote: “A movie so engaging that it’s hard to believe there’s a film crew there with lights and cameras. Astoundingly real.” A third, more clipped: “Absolutely riveting film. There are few films I’d say were ‘must-see’; this is one of them.” The recurring thread is realism, not stars.
What the new audience is responding to, more than the plot, is the camera. The film is shot almost entirely in tight, handheld close-ups inside Mosul’s half-destroyed apartment blocks and cafés. The squad’s body language carries most of the storytelling. The actors are speaking Iraqi Arabic in a war zone that looks and sounds like Iraq, even if it was built in Morocco.
One of the best war action thrillers in last few years. Mosul is one of the more memorable war movies i saw in last few years. Its brutal, bloody, very realistic and intense action war thriller. Not to be missed.
The one thing viewers keep landing on is the absence of Hollywood framing. No slow-motion hero shot, no American face to anchor the audience, no musical swell at the finish. The SWAT team fights, dies, jokes about cigarettes, and keeps moving. The film is grim, technical, and uninterested in being liked.
The Real Story Behind the Film
Mogelson’s New Yorker article, the basis for the screenplay, was published on February 6, 2017, four months before the Iraqi government formally declared Mosul retaken in July 2017. The piece followed the Nineveh SWAT team as it waited in a village north of the city to be deployed into the final fight. Mogelson rode with the unit for weeks, listening to the personal stories that had driven each man to enlist. Those stories included a corporal whose wife was shot dead by Al Qaeda assassins in front of their ten-day-old daughter. They also included an intelligence officer whose brother was beheaded on camera by an ISIS court, and a deputy commander whose jaw was held together by four metal pins after being shot in the face in 2004.
The SWAT team itself was reconstituted in 2014 by Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, a Mosul native whose own brother had been killed by ISIS. Recruitment, Mogelson reported, was conditional: a candidate had to have been wounded by ISIS or lost a close family member to it. That rule, which Carnahan preserves in the film’s premise, was real. It was the unit’s way of making sure every member had a reason to keep fighting that no payroll could match.
The Battle of Mosul itself ran from October 17, 2016, when the campaign to retake the city began, to July 2017, when Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and coalition-aligned militiamen took part. ISIS had controlled Mosul since June 2014, when the group overran the city in a single day. The militants seized heavy weapons from abandoned Iraqi bases and forced the army’s collapse along the Tigris. The film is set in the 2016 to 2017 final phase of that fight.
- June 2014: ISIS overruns Mosul in a single day, taking control of Iraq’s second-largest city.
- October 17, 2016: The Iraqi campaign to retake Mosul begins, involving more than 100,000 soldiers and allied militiamen.
- February 6, 2017: Luke Mogelson’s article on the Nineveh SWAT team is published in The New Yorker.
- July 2017: Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi formally declares Mosul liberated from ISIS.
- September 2019: Mosul premieres at the 76th Venice International Film Festival.
- November 26, 2020: Mosul begins streaming on Netflix.
Where Mosul Is Streaming Now
Mosul is currently available to stream on Netflix in most regions. It has lived there since November 26, 2020. The film runs 101 minutes and is in Iraqi Arabic with English subtitles.
After the film drew high viewership in Europe and the Middle East in late 2020 and early 2021, several cast members received death threats on social media. The threats came from accounts claiming to be affiliated with ISIS, according to a January 2021 report. The threats never slowed the film’s quiet global run. They also confirmed what the film itself shows: the war it depicts is not over, even when the city is. Five years on, audiences are still walking into that war one building at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Mosul on Netflix a true story?
Yes. The film is based on the 2016 to 2017 Battle of Mosul, in which Iraqi forces and coalition allies retook Iraq’s second-largest city from ISIS, and the screenplay is adapted from Luke Mogelson’s 2017 New Yorker article “The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS,” which followed the real Nineveh SWAT team.
Is Mosul the movie good?
Critics gave it an 84% Rotten Tomatoes score and 71 on Metacritic. The 2025 to 2026 wave of viewer reviews on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes has been stronger than the critic scores, with many reviewers comparing it to Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan.
Who made the Mosul Netflix film?
Mosul was written and directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan, whose previous screenwriting credits include The Kingdom and Deepwater Horizon. It was produced by Joe and Anthony Russo through their production company AGBO, alongside Image Nation and Condé Nast Entertainment.
Where was Mosul filmed?
Principal photography took place in Marrakesh, Morocco, with production design by Philip Ivey, even though the story is set in Iraq. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore used handheld cameras to give the combat sequences a documentary feel.
How long is Mosul on Netflix?
The film runs 101 minutes and has been available on the platform since November 26, 2020.
