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Mosul Eye
ByPublisher Description
A Clandestine History of Mosul Under the Islamic State
When ISIS overran Mosul in June 2014, a young historian 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, he 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 discovered.”
But he survived. And the archive he built survived with him.
Only years later would he discover that his secret reports, written by generator light to the sound of drones overhead, were being read not only by his neighbors and the world's newspapers—but by governments, analysts, and intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which relied on his work as one of the finest inside sources produced during the occupation.
Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS is the story of how a quiet scholar became the most elusive witness to one of the darkest chapters of the 21st century, and how knowledge, discipline, and truth outlasted a terror state.
When ISIS overran Mosul in June 2014, a young historian 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, he 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 discovered.”
But he survived. And the archive he built survived with him.
Only years later would he discover that his secret reports, written by generator light to the sound of drones overhead, were being read not only by his neighbors and the world's newspapers—but by governments, analysts, and intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which relied on his work as one of the finest inside sources produced during the occupation.
Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS is the story of how a quiet scholar became the most elusive witness to one of the darkest chapters of the 21st century, and how knowledge, discipline, and truth outlasted a terror state.
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About Omar Mohammed
Born in 1986 in Mosul to ancient Moslawis, Omar Mohammed was schooled in the alleys of Badr al-Din Lu'lu' before going on to study in Cairo, Paris, and New Haven. Though he holds a BA, an MA, and a PhD, IT has nonetheless rendered him largely illiterate. Since coming of age, he has been leading a double life—as a historian and otherwise—using English to write up his scholarship, and Arabic and French to write between the lines of what could not be signed, in the stubborn attempt to distinguish fiction from reality. Although childless, his cat, named Plato, who behaves accordingly, and his dog, Grace, hold his heart, even as he shares his time between Paris, Washington, the Mediterranean, and a city he keeps returning to, whether or not it is his to return to. Of course, they share his love with the archives nobody else would read.
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