In 2016, two years after Islamic State fighters overran Iraq's Anbar Province and captured Mosul, Ramadi, and Fallujah, Iraqi security forces move to take the territory back one town at a time. VICE News embeds with Iraq's Golden Division Special Forces unit as they push into villages around the city of Hit, filming firefights, ambushes, and sniper fire from inside the advance. The camera also catches the harder, slower work behind the fighting: soldiers trying to separate suspected Islamic State operatives and sympathizers from ordinary residents who never left. Iranian-backed Shiite militias and US military advisors and warplanes back the offensive, an alliance that sits uneasily with Anbar's status as Iraq's Sunni heartland, long distrustful of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. The film does not resolve that tension, it documents it happening on the ground, village by village, as soldiers fight for territory whose people they still have to convince.