Ephraim Mattos: Former Navy SEAL sniper in Battle of Mosul

The global war on ISIS is over, but the memories are still fresh. In the following combat video, you will see a former Navy Seal sniper Ephraim Mattos. The story of Ephraim Mattos is related to the organization Stronghold Rescue & Relief. It is an organization formed by Mattos himself. Actually, it is a non-profit organization that provides humanitarian assistance to those in need in conflict zones.

Free Burma Rangers

In this certain footage, Mattos, who voluntarily joined the fight against ISIS is seen assaulting an ISIS-occupied house in a village near Mosul, Iraq during the Battle of Mosul. He fights beside the Free Burma Rangers. The house they were assaulting was held by at least two enemy combatants including one machine gunner whose gun jammed during the engagement as he attempted to open fire on Mattos and his approaching team. Instead of fixing his problem and reloading the gun to continue fighting, he and his comrade fled into the tunnel and tried to hide.⁠

After they secured the house and the entry to the tunnel, the Iraqi demolition team collapsed the tunnel on top of them and they were buried alive. Shortly after the Battle of Mosul was over, Ephraim Mattos wrote an interesting book about his experience during the war against ISIS in Iraq together with Scott McEwen who also wrote AMERICAN SNIPER. The book was named ‘City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul’.

Stronghold Rescue & Relief

Ephraim Mattos’s story is a taut real-life thriller and probably has good chances to be portrayed in Hollywood in the future. In 2010, he graduated high school in Wisconsin and went straight to the US Navy. After finishing BUD/s and his enlistment as a SEAL, he spent six years as an elite warrior before ending his service in April. 2017. Only a few months after, he found himself in Iraq, fighting ISIS as a volunteer.

As a founder of Stronghold Rescue & Relief, Ephraim Mattos volunteered to work as a civilian combat medic on the front lines of the battle to retake Mosul from ISIS – the bloodiest urban combat the world has seen since World War II. While on that mission, Ephraim was shot by ISIS while participating in a rescue operation to save Iraqi civilians stranded in ISIS territory.

During his recovery, Ephraim Mattos started writing his book and it has soon become a vivid and brilliantly reported account of events on the front-lines which gives the reader a real dose of reality. 

Battle of Mosul

The Battle for Mosul was a huge military operation to recapture Iraq’s second-largest city from the so-called Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS, ISIL). It lasted for 9 months and 4 days (October 16, 2016 – July 20, 2017). It was the turning point of the Iraqi civil war, ISIS lost much territory it occupied earlier and the Iraqi army got battle-hardened.

The death toll in the Battle of Mosul is estimated to the 15000 to 31000. The main belligerents in the Battle of Mosul were the Iraqi Armed Forces and Peshmerga units supported by Western countries, mostly as air support and special forces advisers and the militants of the so-called Islamic State.

In fierce fighting, Iraqi and Peshmerga forces regained control over Mosul and defeated ISIS militants in the largest single military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was the largest deployment of Iraqi troops since the Invasion.