Mosul archaeologist Nadeem and his family escaped the building in which they had been trapped during the US-led battle to retake the city from ISIS, not knowing that the person who arranged their evacuation had been a close friend.
Omar Mohammed, who blogged about the ISIS occupation under the pseudonym Mosul Eye, had attended Nadeem’s weekly clandestine meetings about the city's archaeology and heritage, which the extremist group had tried to erase.
The story of how he saved his friend and hundreds of others through his live tweeting of the occupation and the war is told in Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War against ISIS. The new book recalls the ISIS occupation and the battle to liberate the city.
Mr Mohammed saw his mission as a historian to tell the story of a city under siege to a wider public, blogging about information he had gathered from daily conversations and life in the city.
By 2016, he had fled Mosul to Paris, tracking the war online by satellite imagery, speaking to civilians trapped in the city and publishing co-ordinates on his Twitter account.
Having rejected requests for years to share his information with intelligence services, he was now sending life-saving information to US Central Command and Iraqi security forces. As a historian, he could direct Iraqi rescuers through the side streets that he knew inside out.
Nadeem - whose real name is withheld in the book - his family, and their neighbours were saved that day. But Mr Mohammed could not tell them who he was at the time. He needed to keep his identity secret to protect his family and friends in Mosul.
His new book includes a letter written to him by the late Pope Francis, and a foreword by David Petraeus, the retired army general who led the US forces in Mosul after the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Today, Mr Mohammed fears that the reconstruction of the city alone will not heal its wounds.
The city – one of the world’s oldest – was once a major Levantine centre on the trade route to India, where communities of different faiths and languages co-existed for centuries. Yet decades of sectarianism and conflict, compounded by ISIS’s occupation, eroded this social fabric.
Mosul became known as a homogeneous, religiously conservative city, and a hotbed of terrorism. A US-led campaign to force ISIS out of the city in 2016 and 2017 all but flattened it.
Mr Mohammed compares the ISIS occupation and the ensuing US-led war to the sacking of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh in 612 BC. Mosul was built on the ruins of Nineveh.
"Mosul witnessed the same thing in 2014 to 2017. A new city has emerged, because the residents are not completely the same," he told The National. "There are new societies, a new system of living and meaning, and a new understanding of the borders of the city."
ISIS's infiltration
The book begins with the last shots fired in ISIS's takeover of the city in June 2014. The group had already taken the Syrian city of Raqqa that year. Iraqi security forces, reviled for their sectarianism by the city’s residents, withdrew from the capital almost without a fight.
The takeover was followed by weeks of unsettling calmness. The city’s minorities remained in their homes. For a brief moment, residents were relieved to shed another oppressive regime – the Iraqi security forces who for years had persecuted them, extorted them at checkpoints or tortured them under detention.
People note that “at least the roads are open now” as these official checkpoints withered. One of his friends, who had been tortured by Iraqi security forces in 2009, is among those who joined ISIS after the invasion.
But that breathing space was short lived. Four weeks in, ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi made his first public appearance outside Al Nuri Mosque to issue the city’s constitution. The massacres of Yazidis in the Sinjar mountains and the Shabaks in the Nineveh plains, and the expulsion of Mosul’s Christians soon followed.
Breaking the city's spirit
ISIS's sectarian massacres are well documented, not least its killings of thousands of Yazidis, a secretive religious community that lived in the city and the neighbouring Sinjar mountains. Those attacks in August of 2014 have been described as a genocide by the UN.
Mr Mohammed's book sheds light on ISIS's failed attempts to incorporate Mosul's Christian community into the city to legitimise its rule.
The group offered the city's religious leaders the opportunity to pay a jizya, a historical tax imposed on non-Muslim communities living in Islamic societies. This tax made them protected citizens, allowed to practise their religion and exempted from military service.
The offer had been accepted by Christians in Raqqa, who signed the covenant on condition of anonymity, Mr Mohammed writes. For ISIS, this was a "proof of concept" that it could govern as historical caliphates had done.
But the Christians of Mosul refused and were told to leave the city, with their properties seized.
In another grim episode, an ISIS member and acquaintance of Mr Mohammed describes the massacre of women from a Shabak village – a Shiite community perceived to have been aligned to Iran – in terms of it being "cleaned".
Bureaucratic takeover
The book shows how ISIS control of the city was first bureaucratic, rather than military.
ISIS had been increasing its presence around the city for years before the invasion, with many of its members part of local police forces and other institutions. Once the cloak of government security forces was removed, the movement fomenting beneath it took over.
Many members were former officers of Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence services, which were developed with support from the Soviet Union. They brought with them a hierarchical command structure, intelligence compartmentalisation and the “instinct to document everything”. “The caliphate’s language was seventh-century Islamic governance. Its architecture was twentieth-century Iraqi military bureaucracy,” Mr Mohammed writes.
ISIS exploited people’s complaints and pain, establishing a Bureau of Grievances as its first administrative offices. Mr Mohammed recalls how people lined up with copies of their deeds or contracts to record disputes that had occurred under the old regime. “They had come to seek justice from the new authority because the old authority had offered them none,” Mr Mohammed writes.
But the semblance of justice was a foil for the occupation. “It was an intake mechanism that converted the old state’s victims into the new state’s registered subjects,” he writes.
Family life
The book has many heroes but two stand out for revealing how the occupation extended to people’s private lives.
Mr Mohammed’s mother goes unnamed but is always there making tea and dinner. She cares for her adult sons without the suspicion they faced from the authorities and neighbours outside. But the relationship is tempered by what he hides from her: his secret identity as Mosul Eye; the hard drive hidden in his bedroom; and eventually, his plans to flee the city.
The second is his eldest brother Ahmad, a curtain shop owner and father of four who was killed by a mortar shell when Iraqi forces entered the city. Ahmad did not share his brother’s passion for history and letters, but he had enjoyed going with him to Nadeem’s discussions on archaeology.
In their last conversation – when Omar Mohammed had fled Iraq to Paris – Ahmad asked what the city looked like, what the food and libraries were like, and whether he had found a nice cafe.
Across the city, residents went through the daily motions imposed on them by the occupying powers, fearing that the slightest deviation could have them killed. “The people have become robots,” Mr Mohammed wrote in 2014.
His double life and the numbness he developed towards the city’s pain weighed on him, as it did on others. “The operative had grown so large inside me that the historian was disappearing … eaten alive by the man who counted the dead … I could feel it happening. The shrinking of the part of me that thought about history, about ideas, about the long arcs of civilisations."
Throughout, Mr Mohammed received offers to share the information he had gathered with US and other intelligence services. He rejected these, choosing to prioritise the work of an independent writer and historian.
But this changed when the US-led coalition operation to retake Mosul began in 2016. Mr Mohammed had by then fled Mosul to Turkey then Paris, making contact with Centcom and sharing information he had from sources in the city, along with co-ordinates.
Civilians pay the price
Mosul’s civilians were punished for ISIS’s takeover of the city. For Iraqis, they were untouchables – suspected ISIS collaborators who survived the occupation. For the US-led coalition, they were collateral damage in a war that was designed to “annihilate” ISIS.
“The American Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, described the strategy against ISIS as one of annihilation. The word was his. More than a million people were sealed inside the city when the annihilation began,” Mr Mohammed writes.
He reminds the reader that Mosul’s residents were shop owners who kept trading to prevent starvation, families who stayed because they knew they were not wanted elsewhere, and teachers who kept teaching to avoid execution.
What comes next
Today, questions remain over what comes next for the devastated city.
Al Nuri mosque and its Hadba leaning minaret, and the Tahera church are among the city's landmarks that have been restored, with assistance from the UAE. The city's markets and daily life are also reviving.
The city's young are driving a cultural revival with a nostalgia for Mosul's history that was all but erased. But preserving the city's cultural memory also involves asking "difficult" questions about Mosul's modern history, Mr Mohammed tells The National.
Among his recent projects has been working with surviving members of Mosul's Jewish community, who were expelled from the city in 1951 and now live in Europe.
But the diversity that once defined the city could be lost forever. Mr Mohammed fears that the ISIS occupation marked "the end" of the Yazidi presence in the city. Likewise, the thousands of Christians who fled and emigrated are also unlikely to return.
“My only hope is that the city can overcome its fear of posing questions," he told The National. "Mosul has never been able to ask questions about its past and its future. There are many unanswered questions, which allows anyone to come and claim that city.”
