JAYVEE UPDATE: Iraqis Tell of Islamic State Brutality in Mosul.

Islamic State had planted a bomb just outside Mr. Khalif’s front door in western Mosul to prepare for an expected advance by Iraqi troops. The family saw the extremists set up the booby trap and was forced to live with it, and a few days ago, Mr. Khalif’s wife went to milk the family cow and accidentally stepped on the trigger.

A day later, the 76-year-old patriarch and his family crowded into his home to prepare for the burial. They said a mortar fell on the gathering during breakfast, killing the other family members.

“When the fighting started, Daesh wouldn’t let anyone leave their houses,” said Mr. Khalif, a shepherd from rural Mosul, using an Arabic acronym for the terror group. He said Islamic State forced him and his family to move into the embattled northern city when the Mosul offensive first began in October to serve as a human shields. Mr. Khalif and surviving family members said they had fled to safety elsewhere in Mosul as fighting erupted in the neighborhood.

As Iraqi forces have squeezed the militants into a fast-shrinking patch of territory in the western half of Mosul over the past week, stories of Islamic State’s trademark brutality are proliferating. The offensive has already sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing with tales of the terror they endured.

That ISIS was dismissed and allowed to fester for so long is probably the Obama Administration’s second-most disastrous foreign policy mistake, right after the Iran Deal.