In June 2014, roughly 1,500 ISIS fighters took Mosul from an Iraqi army garrison of some 30,000 soldiers, and a city of 1.8 million people fell in days. Graham Templeton's film works backward from that collapse, tracing Mosul's history from antiquity through the Ottoman period and World War I to the borders drawn by colonial powers that left Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and smaller religious communities sharing a city none of them fully controlled. Saddam Hussein's rule and its collapse under the 2003 U.S.-led invasion get particular attention, along with how the Syrian civil war next door fed fighters and weapons back across the border. The film details the specific failures inside Mosul itself: mass desertions among police and army units, broken supply lines, and units left without enough ammunition to hold their positions. It closes with Iraqi forces beginning the effort to retake the city in October 2016, the outcome still undecided as the film ends. Narration and animation carry the history; there is no on-camera interview footage.