Mosul under ISIS

Eyewitness Accounts of Life in the Caliphate

Mathilde Becker Aarseth

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755607112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) ruled Mosul from 2014-2017 in accordance with its extremist interpretation of sharia. But beyond what is known about ISIS governance in the city from the group's own materials, very little is understood about the reality of its rule, or reasons for its failure, from those who actually lived under it. This book reveals what was going on inside ISIS institutions based on accounts from the civilians themselves. Focusing on ISIS governance of education, healthcare and policing, the interviewees include: teachers who were forced to teach the group's new curriculum; professors who organized secret classes in private; doctors who took direct orders from ISIS leaders and worked in their headquarters; bureaucratic staff who worked for ISIS. These accounts provide unique insight into the lived realities in the controlled territories and reveal how the terrorist group balanced their commitment to Islamist ideology with the practical challenges of state building. Moving beyond the simplistic dichotomy of civilians as either passive victims or ISIS supporters, Mathilde Becker Aarseth highlights here those people who actively resisted or affected the way in which ISIS ruled. The book invites readers to understand civilians' complex relationship to the extremist group in the context of fragmented state power and a city torn apart by the occupation.

1

Introduction

«Welcome to the Islamic State»

On the 4th of June 2014 Karim drove to work at the University of Mosul, crossing the bridge over to the East bank of the river Tigris, together with his wife Noor, who was eight months pregnant. Traffic was dense, and the June heat was sweltering. It was a normal day, as far as normalcy go in Mosul. It was true that the city had over time become an epicenter for violent insurgent groups—they were too many for Karim to remember most of their names. It was a well-known, but unofficial truth that the city was in the chokehold of armed militiamen. Chief among them was the entity known among most Maslawis as simply “Al-Qaida,” who operated as a mafia organization and had grown as a tumor in the city since 2005. This group of militant, self-proclaimed Salafis now had tentacles in all parts of the economic and political life of Mosul, from the smallest corner shop and all the way up to the governor’s office. If someone received a phone call from “Al-Qaida,” he had to yield to its demands or face abduction, a bomb on his family`s doorstep, or being targeted in a drive-by shooting. “Iraqis must have a short memory in order to survive,” some say in Mosul. And Karim, like other Maslawis, tried his best to maintain a regular life in the midst of smoldering violence. He and Noor were excited to receive their first-born child, mixed with worry because Noor’s first pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.

This workday, however, was cut short already at ten o’clock in the morning, when Karim´s colleagues told him that a big bomb had gone off in the center of Mosul.¹ Even this was nothing far away from the usual; it happened every two-three months that an armed group staged an attack against an Iraqi army checkpoint, a military installation, or a political representative. The last months the attacks had become more frequent. “Usually when there is a bomb in Mosul, they close all the bridges, and then it can take four or five hours to return home. So my employer let everyone go home before the bridges closed,” Karim remembers. He jumped in his car and picked up Noor, heading back across the bridge. Usually, the way home would be scattered with checkpoints manned by Iraqi security forces, hampering the everyday movement of the inhabitants and causing a great deal of anger among the locals. If checkpoint guards had a bad day, it could mean that Karim and Noor would spend three hours each way. On this day, Karim remembers, they were home in just fifteen minutes. The soldiers usually manning the checkpoints had vanished into thin air.

A citywide curfew was announced in Mosul, and the couple stayed in their home, located right next to Ghazlani military base, one of two Iraqi army bases in Mosul. But unlike normal curfews, this was not lifted after a few hours—it lasted for three days. Unprepared, Karim and Noor quickly ran out of drinking water and food. On the third day, the 6th of June, they heard on the news that the group that called itself “the Islamic State” had seized control over the North-Western suburb Tamuz 17 and that armed militiamen were closing in on the city center from four additional suburbs. At this point, the name Islamic State was something most Maslawis knew only from TV news reports on Syria. Karim was unsure what to think of the news that the group might be coming for Mosul. If it was true, the army base next door would be a prime target. “You have to leave your area, now,” a close friend of Karim living in East Mosul urged him on the phone. On that day, Noor started bleeding, and the couple worried for their unborn baby as they were cut off from medical help. After several hours of phone calls, Karim finally got the permission to leave the house from an acquaintance in the army. On the way out, it struck him that their closest neighbor was a Christian family with an elderly woman. If it was true that violent jihadis were approaching, he feared for their safety, so he knocked on their door and offered them to leave together. They accepted the offer and hurdled together in the car.

When Karim’s car reached the bridge going over to the East side of the Tigris, they realized that the army had blocked the bridge with concrete blocks and it was only possible to pass by foot. All streets leading up to the bridge were jammed with cars desperately trying to cross. Karim turned back, but from a distance, he spotted three pick-up trucks at the entrance of Ghazlani military base, with armed men wearing something that looked like dark brown uniforms. The base had been captured by jihadi militants, and thousands of Iraqi army soldiers were escaping in full speed, without a fight. Shocked, Karim, Noor, and their neighbor hurried back to the bridge to cross by foot. “Then we saw that the Iraqi army had removed the concrete blocks, and they were driving fast across the bridge to escape from Daesh. They escaped before the citizens, leaving us in the middle of the bridge. Daesh was behind us, the army escaping in front of us. People were screaming around us and shots were fired,” he recalls. Both Noor and the elderly neighbor had problems walking. Little by little, they managed to cross the bridge in the midst of the chaos, and Karim left the others in a relative’s home, then returned to get his car in the early hours of June 7th.

Their whole area was deserted. When he reached his house, a sniper’s bullet whizzed past his head, and he ran to the back entrance. The doors and windows of his house were open, and outside lied deserted military boots and uniforms. “All our clothes were strewn around the house, the soldiers had been looking for civilian clothes to escape among the civilians,” Karim says. He heard a man shout from the outside: “Who are you? Welcome to the Islamic State.” Karim peeked out and saw eight armed men dressed in black and brown. He shouted back and convinced the men that he was an unarmed civilian. “One of them had an Iraqi dialect, but he had hidden his face. They didn’t have beards, they were young, 16–17 years old,” Karim recalls. The new rulers of the neighborhood gave him five minutes to grab the belongings he wanted, “the rest is the mulk [war booty] of the Islamic State,” he was told. He grabbed his and Noor’s identification papers, some clothes, and his laptop, and drove off in his car. That was the last time he saw his home. The next day they drove to relatives in Mosul Dam, and then to Erbil in the autonomous Kurdish region, where Noor finally had a caesarian and gave birth to their daughter.

Figure 2 View of Mosul’s Old city across the Tigris before it was destroyed in 2017 (Photo: Ammar Galala).

Each of the nearly two million inhabitants of Mosul has his or her own story of the confused first minutes, hours, and days of the ISIS occupation of Mosul, and the first encounters with their new rulers. Following the shock of having been left alone by their own government, in the weeks following June 6th, impossible choices had to be made. Leaving entire lives behind and going into exile in the Kurdish region or abroad, facing years of difficulties as outsiders? Or staying at home, protecting belongings and old relatives, under unknown rulers who had proclaimed an Islamic State? More than half a million people fled the city during the first days, as it became clear that the army was not going to return to protect the population.² For the ones who stayed behind, three years followed under the harsh rule of the Islamic State, one of modern history’s most elaborate examples of rebels ruling a civilian population. After the unexpectedly easy capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and the entire Ninawa province, caravans of ISIS hummers continued their rampage South and West. To the South, they captured territory all the way to Tikrit, the provincial capital of Salah al-Din, and temporarily controlled Kirkuk, Ramadi, and Fallujah before they were pushed back. To the West, they took full control over the mountainous Sinjar province. At its peak in October 2014, it was one of the most powerful non-state armed forces in the world, controlling an area of more than 100,000 square kilometers³—the home of more than eight million people. With rhetoric familiar from other jihadi-Salafi groups,⁴ ISIS portrayed itself as a revolutionary, anti-systemic movement that wants to alter the existing world order. In a July 2014 audio message, its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi underlined that the Islamic State was indeed a state, and that it would return “dignity, might, rights, and leadership”⁵ to the worldwide Muslim community. National borders, ethnicity, culture, and traditional hierarchies had all become irrelevant. In the new “caliphate,” Al-Baghdadi professed, “the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the Easterner and Westerner are all brothers. It is a caliphate that has brought together the Caucasian, Indian, Chinese, shami, Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, maghribi, American, French, German, and Australian.”⁶ The only categories that mattered in the world view of the Islamic State, the group claimed, were Muslim and non-Muslim. And it was up to the new rulers to decide who qualified as a true Muslim.

The message of ISIS shares many characteristics with those of other state-building revolutionary movements in history. Compromise with its enemies is impossible; its victory is inevitable, as long as supporters remain steadfast; and its model is universally applicable.⁷ For ISIS, governing civilians was more than an unavoidable by-product of territorial control and economic dominance. Ruling the population in accordance with shariʿa was at the core of its project and central to its communication toward new recruits, the world’s governments, and Iraqis and Syrians. Its slogan was baqiyya wa tatamaddad, “remaining and expanding,” and its ambitions for territorial expansion were, in theory, never-ending. Overnight, Mosul’s remaining inhabitants were left in a city with no Iraqi state presence, a city that they were told was the center of a new state encompassing a third of Iraq and large parts of Syria. After six months, the exit option was closed by ISIS. There would be no “caliphate” without civilians, and the group imposed death sentence on those trying to flee Mosul. After that point, the exiled Maslawis (residents of Mosul) could only communicate with their remaining friends and relatives via broken, self-censored phone conversations.

The view from the street

Four years after the liberation of Mosul from the clutch of ISIS, there is little systematic knowledge about how the group ruled the population that happened to become its citizens. Because of the sudden relevance the group had for Western security establishments, a large number of non-academic policy reports, research notes, and papers by think thanks and governmental bodies have been published on the group since 2014.⁸ Naturally, the academic conversation on the complexities of the group and its rule is still evolving, and important work has been published that sheds light on various aspects of the group. Most publications have focused on the historical explanations for its rise⁹ and the characteristics and ideology of the group.¹⁰ Some have dealt with its finances,¹¹ its foreign fighters,¹² or the background of its members and leaders. Some publications are built on administrative documents,¹³ available propaganda sources,¹⁴ or interviews with militants. However, most existing accounts have relied heavily on journalism and secondary sources; partly because it has been challenging to gain access to primary sources. While excellent journalism has been produced on various aspects of ISIS, most often journalistic accounts fall short of providing generalizable information on ISIS governance. Because of security concerns, funding, and the nature of journalism, it has most often offered snapshots of its governance, specific to time and place. Over-reliance on journalistic sources is a limitation when it comes to accuracy, bias and underreporting.¹⁵ This has been a weakness for studies of violent insurgent groups more broadly.¹⁶ Furthermore, partly because of funding and government interests, many such reports analyze ISIS through a security or military lens.¹⁷ While policy-oriented research reports can contribute important insight, they also have their limitations. Systematic empirical data are often lacking, and the group is often described in a language of “exceptionalism,” focusing on the extreme violence that has become its trademark, sometimes ignoring the wider historical and academic framework necessary to further our understanding of the group. Documentation of the group’s most violent sides is important, not least in trying to build legal cases against perpetrators. The group’s violence has posed an existential threat to certain ethnic, religious, professional, or other groups in Iraq and Syria. The true extent of ISIS’s atrocities is slowly being discovered in mass graves since the liberation of its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, in the context of these countries’ recent history, the extreme brutality shown in ISIS propaganda material and recounted by refugees is not as exceptional as is often portrayed in Western media and in some scholarship. Without minimizing the extreme suffering brought on by ISIS, it is necessary to move beyond the language of exceptional violence and situate the group in the context of existing literature on comparable conflicts. Furthermore, most of the existing material on this topic describes the group’s activities in Syria,¹⁸ even though the group’s Iraqi roots and leadership have been more decisive for its development, and are crucial in order to understand its focus on territory and governance. Iraqis have occupied a disproportionate number of governor positions in the “caliphate.” While ISIS’s forerunners only became active in Syria after 2011, they have been in Iraq for more than fourteen years.

Many publications touch upon the issue of ISIS governance, but comprehensive studies of this important aspect of the organization are lacking.¹⁹ The existing and expanding trove of ISIS-produced documents has been a source for many reports on its governance. Although they can give unique insight, such documents must be seen as a part of ISIS’s constant propaganda machinery—produced to justify their “state.” The best available corrective to the descriptions found in ISIS-produced sources is interviews with people who were on the receiving end of these “state” functions. Civilians who tried to go about their daily lives in Mosul are probably our best sources to describe what the “state” functions looked like in practice for the people they were, according to its propaganda, constructed to serve. The findings in the book are based on interviews conducted on three field trips to Northern Iraq in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and the method, challenges, and possible pitfalls are described in detail in the last chapter of this book. Most of the interviewees are civilians who experienced more than seven months of ISIS rule; users and providers of public services under ISIS. They had children in ISIS-run schools; they were treated in ISIS-run hospitals; they studied at the university, or worked as bureaucrats, teachers, nurses, doctors, priests, and other professions where they had face-to-face encounters with their new rulers. The interviews were conducted in camps for internally displaced persons in Northern Iraq, as well as in Mosul, Erbil, and Duhok. Additional interviews were done remotely. The interviewees also include Iraqi politicians, researchers, and NGOs, and the interview data is analyzed in the light of the information gathered from a wide range of ISIS-produced administrative documents and propaganda as well as secondary sources.

Interview data are indirect representations of people’s experiences. Interviews are also interactions, and as an interviewer, I choose what to follow up on, when to open or close a topic. This is inevitable; what the informant says is always influenced by the interviewer and the interview situation. In qualitative research, it is not the goal to eliminate this influence of the researcher, but to understand it and use it productively. I strove to achieve as wide a scope of interviewees as possible. The fact that I am a female researcher from a Western country may have affected the interview situation in several ways. At the time of my first trip, Norway was directly involved in the coalition that had destroyed many of my interviewees’ homes. This was never brought up during interviews, but it says something about a potential power imbalance. Being a woman in a conservative male-dominated society like Iraq can potentially limit both my own freedom to do interviews where and when I want, and the...