Photographing the rise and fall of Isil: the human cost of war through the eyes of Telegraph’s Sam Tarling

“It was a kind of underwhelming if I’m honest,” chuckles Sam Tarling as he attempts to describe how it felt to watch the fall of Isil a month ago.

“I know it sounds strange,” he says. “But the whole thing went out with a whimper, rather than a bang. Imagine, the once huge entity, that had threatened the world had been reduced to this tiny little thing. It wasn’t a grand finale.”

Tarling is a war photographer for The Telegraph and has documented the rise and fall of Isil, from the terror group’s capture of Mosul in 2014 to its final capitulation in Syria earlier this year. 

The videos in this article are Tarling’s description of what was running through his mind as he took each shot. 

An Iraqi…

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