Mosul After ISIS

At the checkpoint outside Mosul, we stood beside Iraqi soldiers while trucks passed behind concrete barriers.

Some of the soldiers agreed to photographs. Iraqi flags were stitched onto their uniforms. Radios, protective equipment and weapons hung from their bodies. One of them wore a red beret. Another had most of his face covered.

Beyond that checkpoint was Mosul.

I had been hearing the name of this city for years. Mosul had become one of those places repeatedly shown on television until its name seemed inseparable from war.

Now I was going inside.

From Erbil to Mosul in 2018

I visited Mosul in 2018.

I had met Calvin from Monsoon Diaries at a hotel in Erbil, and somehow we encouraged each other to make the journey. Venla joined us as well. Calvin later had to return for his flight, so I continued exploring Mosul with Venla.

At that time, traveling from Erbil toward Mosul also meant moving from the Kurdistan Region into territory controlled by Iraq's federal authorities. The military checkpoints were therefore not simply something left over from the battle. They were part of the practical geography of traveling there in 2018.

The city had been liberated from ISIS the previous year. Security was still everywhere.

One of my photographs from those days shows an old blue van with rust along the doors and spare tires tied to the roof.

Small things survive in photographs.

The larger memory is rubble.

The Mosul I expected — and the Mosul I didn't

Before going there, the image in my mind was simple: Mosul had been destroyed.

Once inside, that became more complicated.

Parts of it looked exactly like the city I expected from the news. Buildings were open to the sky. Entire floors had collapsed. Concrete reinforcing bars stuck out from slabs. Streets disappeared into piles of stone.

But move away from the worst sections and another city appeared.

There were vehicles. There were open shops. There were restaurants. People were working.

At one shop I photographed a man behind a huge metal tray filled with an orange shredded pastry. Several portions had already been cut away. A plastic bag of bread hung behind him.

The pastry appeared to be a form of knafeh or a closely related local sweet: fine pastry strands baked in a large tray, served in portions with a sweet filling and syrup.

Whatever its exact name at that shop, that moment did something the ruined buildings could not.

Someone had opened for business. Someone was eating sweets.

Mosul was not waiting to become a city again. People were already using it.

University of Mosul

Then came the university.

Several sections of the campus had been badly damaged during the occupation and the fighting.

The photograph shows what that meant physically. Floors are exposed. Exterior walls have disappeared. Parts of the structure look almost sliced open.

But the university was not simply an abandoned ruin.

Even when I visited, academic activity had started again in surviving sections.

That was one of the strange patterns I kept seeing in Mosul: destruction and use occupying the same space. A university building could be wrecked while students returned somewhere nearby. A street could end in rubble while another street had open restaurants.

The Nineveh Oberoi

Near the Tigris stood another completely different piece of Mosul.

The Nineveh Oberoi Hotel was a monumental building from the 1980s, constructed in the kind of large-scale modern architecture that was meant to project importance.

My photograph of it is almost deceptive. There are green trees and pink flowers in the foreground. Behind them rises the enormous beige hotel with its stepped façade and repeated balconies. You could photograph it quickly and imagine a functioning resort.

Its recent history was very different.

The building had been taken over during the ISIS occupation and was damaged during the war. By the time I came through Mosul, the hotel belonged to that strange category of structures that were still immediately recognizable but no longer performed the job for which they had been built.

Mosul was full of these interrupted buildings.

Prophet Yunus and the ruined religious landscape

Another place I wanted to see was the site associated with the Prophet Yunus.

Getting access was difficult.

A guard initially didn't want me entering because the ruins were dangerous. After some conversation, I was eventually allowed closer, with a warning about the unstable debris.

Some of my photographs show religious architecture appearing through destruction: damaged houses along a street, and a green dome beyond them.

Mosul's religious buildings were not isolated monuments standing apart from daily life.

Mosques, churches, shrines, markets and houses were packed into the same urban fabric. When one part of that fabric disappeared, the loss therefore wasn't simply an individual historic building. The shape of an entire street could disappear with it.

That became much more obvious when I entered the Old City.

Walking into the Old City of Mosul

This is the photograph that explains the scale best.

A single person stands in the road wearing a yellow backpack. Everything around her is damaged.

On one side, walls have disappeared completely. On the other, several floors of a house remain balanced above broken slabs. Ahead, the road bends into more rubble.

It was difficult to know where one destroyed building finished and another began.

From farther away — like the view across the rooftops toward the Tigris at the top of this page — the ruins became almost geological. The broken houses formed layers across the hillside. Doorways and windows survived in fragments. Here and there one façade remained attached to rooms that no longer existed.

The Old City had absorbed some of the hardest fighting at the end of the battle.

The density visible in the photographs helps explain why the consequences were so severe. These were not isolated buildings separated by large roads. Houses, alleys, shops and religious buildings sat tightly beside one another.

Damage traveled through a neighborhood.

Soldiers were still moving through the ruins when I visited. I photographed several of them. One stood directly in front of a field of broken masonry. Another bent down to examine an opening between collapsed slabs.

That reminds me how unstable everything was.

The war had stopped. The physical danger had not simply disappeared with it.

The word on the ground

At one point I looked down and saw an Arabic word written in the dust.

Daesh.

It is the Arabic acronym widely used for the group also called ISIS or Islamic State.

Seeing the name written casually on the ground felt very different from hearing it on television. For years the word had represented maps, reports and battles far away.

Here it was under my feet.

I took the photograph and kept walking.

What I had got wrong about Mosul

My mistake was thinking I would find one condition.

Destroyed or rebuilt. Dangerous or normal. Empty or inhabited.

Mosul wasn't one of those things.

It was all of them within a few kilometres.

There were objects left from violence and enormous areas of wreckage. But there were also men working behind food counters. Cars moved through the streets. People stood beside the Tigris. Students were already returning to the university.

That contradiction is much closer to what I remember than saying simply that "Mosul was destroyed."

Returning north to Mosul Dam

About two weeks after visiting the city, I came back toward the Mosul area while traveling around Iraq in my camper van.

This time I went to Mosul Dam.

The surroundings could hardly have looked more different from the Old City.

There was open water rather than collapsed streets. Green fields ran toward the reservoir. A young shepherd watched me from the edge of the grass with the calm of someone whose daily landscape had never been on television.

One of the men I met was standing on the bank holding a huge fish.

His trousers were wet. Fishing line ran between his hands. Behind him the reservoir looked calm enough that, without knowing where the photograph had been taken, there would be nothing extraordinary about the scene.

That is where I want to leave this story.

Not with another destroyed building.

With a fisherman holding his catch beside the water north of Mosul, while somewhere behind us a city that had gone through years of war was already filling its streets again.

Continue with my 2018 journey: Van Life Iraq — one month around Iraq with a 4×4 camper van, or go deeper into the region with the M5 highway through wartime Syria.