Mosul Eye

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A Clandestine History of Mosul Under the Islamic State When ISIS overran Mosul in June 2014, a young historian named Omar Mohammed expected to spend his life in archives, not hiding from a death sentence. His ambition had been quiet: to write history, teach students, and preserve his city's past. But within days, Mosul was sealed off from the world—its streets patrolled, its memory suffocating under propaganda—and he found himself forced into a role he had never imagined. From a small room no one ever saw, under a name no one knew, Omar created Mosul Eye . What began as a personal attempt to record the first days of the occupation became, without his knowing it, the only reliable source from inside the terror state. Every detail he wrote—checkpoints, executions, heritage destruction, forbidden rumors—was a risk. Every sentence could have exposed him. ISIS hunted him relentlessly, promising to kill him in a manner "humanity had not yet