On June 10, 2014, the city of Mosul — Iraq’s second largest, home to nearly two million people, built on and around the ruins of the Assyrian capital Nineveh — fell to the Islamic State in a single night. The Iraqi Army dissolved. Soldiers abandoned their uniforms in the streets. By morning, a city that had been continuously inhabited for 7,000 years belonged to a force that intended to abolish everything it had been.
I was inside the city when it fell. I am a historian. When ISIS took Mosul, I made a choice that would define the next three years of my life and reshape everything I understood about myself: I stayed. I documented. I refused to let the occupiers become the sole authors of what was happening to my city.
I was at the University of Mosul when the order came. The security forces issued clear instructions: Everyone must go home. We began running. It is never safe to stay on the streets when Mosul locks down, and even before I understood why this curfew felt different from the others, I could see it in the faces of the people around me. They were not moving with the annoyed haste of people managing another interruption. The sky was dusty and red.
In the early morning hours of June 10 — while gunfire still sounded from the western districts — I had posted on my personal Facebook page, simply noting that I could hear the attacks. A friend messaged me within minutes, warning that I was risking everything.
He was right. I did not stop taking notes, but I stopped posting under my own name. The observation continued; the exposure did not. That shift — from public voice to hidden recorder — was the first step toward what came next, though I did not yet understand where it would lead.
By the afternoon of June 17, I created an anonymous blog on WordPress and wrote the words that mark the real beginning of “Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS.” I chose the name Mosul Eye because I wanted the city to have an eye that saw what was being done to it — an eye that could not be closed by the men who were trying to replace its memory with their own.
My hand was steady as I typed. The rest of me was not. What I witnessed that day was difficult to express. There were many fabrications and false stories being spread by the media, contradicted by reality on the ground. My work as a historian required an unbiased approach. I would keep my personal opinion to myself. I would communicate only the facts I saw. That was not an aesthetic preference. It was a discipline for survival and truth.
One of the armed occupiers gave me a version of events that stayed with me. Their entrance into Mosul, he said, had been planned as a revenge mission. They prepared explosives to secure their withdrawal and expected to remain for two days at most. The collapse of the Iraqi Army had not been expected. But the road opened in front of them, so they did not stop. He called it a liberation like the liberation of Mecca — invoking the Prophet Muhammad’s conquest of that city, framing what had happened as the fulfillment of religious destiny.
The former Counter-Terrorism Center became the main ISIS headquarters. A few of the Arab fighters I had seen in the early days — Tunisians and Algerians who came to Mosul from abroad — were guarding its gates. One of them was white-haired, in his sixties, carrying a pistol at his waist.
Near the University of Mosul, on a public television set mounted in the street, an ISIS video played continuously, showing killings and kidnappings carried out on the Mosul-Baghdad road.
On the evening of June 21, an ISIS fighter drove through a neighborhood with a loudspeaker mounted to his vehicle, announcing that every household was required to send a volunteer to join ISIS forces. The phrasing was precise: Join, defend, live in dignity and honor — or face death.
What I feared was not simply death or occupation in the narrow military sense. I feared civil collapse — the destruction of the conditions under which Mosul could still think of itself as a city belonging to history rather than to sect, revenge, and barbarism.
What ISIS was doing was not only military conquest. It was the systematic dismantling of the arrangements that made that coexistence possible, however imperfectly.
I continued checking rumors, because falsehood was becoming another front in the battle. Rumors circulated that the Mufti of Mosul — the senior Islamic religious authority in the city — was killed by ISIS. I contacted a member of his family and confirmed that he had in fact left Iraq several days before the crisis and was in Qatar.
False atrocity stories, false reassurances, false claims of protection, false reports of siege, false moral panics — Mosul was drowning in all of them, and the drowning served ISIS as much as any of its other tactics. When the population cannot distinguish truth from fabrication, when fear attaches to rumors that have no basis alongside fears that are entirely justified, the result is a kind of paralysis that benefits whoever holds the guns.
To document the city truthfully meant resisting both the lies of ISIS and the sensational fantasies of those outside it.
In the city, ISIS began destroying historical, religious sites. On June 24, the demolition of al-Fatih al-Mosuli began. The shrine, known locally as al-Sheikh Fathi, was pulled down with cranes working in darkness.
Al-Fatih was a Sufi mystic who lived during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the eighth century. Sufism — the mystical tradition within Islam, emphasizing spiritual experience and devotion to saints — was precisely what ISIS, with its rigid scriptural literalism, regarded as idolatry. The shrine had been a place of Sufi pilgrimage for more than seven centuries.
The destruction of the shrines was not random vandalism. ISIS was reorganizing Mosul’s relationship to its own past, removing the physical markers through which the city remembered itself.
I stayed in Mosul not because I was unafraid — I was afraid every day for 18 months, afraid in the specific and draining way of someone who lives with the permanent knowledge of what happens if they are found, a knowledge that becomes the background radiation of every waking moment without ever becoming ordinary.
I stayed because I understood what cities need when they are taken: They need someone who will remember them accurately. Not heroically. Accurately. Someone who will write down the name of the man executed in the public square and the name of the square and the stated charge and the date and the number of people compelled to watch. Someone who will record the price of bread and the closing of the schools and the burning of the library and the empty Christian quarter and the executions after prayers. Someone who will not let the conquerors write the only history.
I did not know then what that choice would demand of me. I did not know how long I would have to continue, how elaborate concealment would become, or how many layers of fear would settle over daily life.
I did not know the names that would later dominate Mosul, the systems that would harden out of those first checkpoints and councils, the punishments that would make private thought dangerous, or the number of dead who would disappear into rumor and category unless someone insisted on fact.
I only knew that Mosul was occupied, that memory was already under attack, that reality itself was being falsified in real time, and that if someone inside the city did not start recording carefully, the occupiers would inherit not only the streets but the narrative.
Mosul had not disappeared into nothing. It had disappeared into another order.
This article has been adapted from “Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS” (Skyhorse, July 21).
