For three years, Lena Kandes and her family lived under ISIS rule in
Mosul. Sequestered in her home after being forced to abandon her university
studies, she created an online alias—which she asked me to use—so she
could connect with the outside world but not be traceable by the Islamic
State’s goons. “We were prisoners there,” she told me earlier this year
in Kurdistan, where her family had fled. “We got close to losing our
minds.” Through a window, she watched a crowd stone to death a woman
suspected of adultery. Kandes felt especially vulnerable because her
father had been a contractor for the U.S. military. They had hosted U.S.
Army officers at their home.
“My father hid the whole time ISIS was in Mosul,” she said. “We changed
his look and burned papers, in the garden, showing that he had worked
with the U.S. Army.” ISIS tried to recruit her sixteen-year-old brother,
the youngest of her siblings, to be a “warrior of God” and a hero. “We
knew from the things he said, the way he was acting,” she told me. “My
mother told him that she’d raised him never to be like this.” The family
bought video games from the underground, to divert his attention.
Last October, Iraq launched an offensive to liberate its second-largest
city. “We were praying and waiting—and waiting,” Kandes said. As the
battles raged, often block by block, her home lost power, then water.
“We were so cold,” she said. “We were running out of strength.” In
December, Kandes’s street became the front line between ISIS and Iraq’s
élite counterterrorism force. “Our kitchen was full of bullets, the
windows were all broken,” she told me. “Then ISIS came and said, ‘This
is a war zone and we want to use your house.’ We were sure, ninety per
cent, that we would die. So many died in our area.”
Kandes, along with her parents and four brothers, decided to try to
escape—by foot. Cars were forbidden to cross into areas under Iraqi Army
control, lest they be driven by suicide bombers. It was a six-mile trek.
After they crossed into government-controlled territory, the family
thought it was safe. “We were walking, we were happy,” she recounted.
She tossed her niqab, the all-encompassing veil required under ISIS rule. “The sun touched my skin. I could smile. My brother gave hugs to
the soldiers.” Then an old man walking with them tripped a buried
explosive—known as an “improvised explosive device,” or I.E.D.—left by
ISIS. The bomb ripped the old man into pieces. Kandes and her family
were all gravely injured by shrapnel that tore through multiple parts of
their bodies.
“The smell of explosives and burning flesh was awful,” Kandes told me.
One of her younger brothers lost an eye, needed multiple surgeries on
both legs, and had to have his left thumb reattached. When I met the
family, four months later, her father was on a futon in the living room
recovering from his fifth surgery. It was the only furniture in their
tiny living area.
On Sunday, Mosul was finally liberated. By then, almost nine hundred
thousand people had fled the northern metropolis on the Tigris River,
according to the United Nations. A total of 4.2 million Iraqis are
displaced across the country, most dependent on varying forms of aid to
survive.
Mosulis are fiercely proud of their city, which has long had an identity
independent of Baghdad, some two hundred and fifty miles to the south.
Many of those I interviewed after ISIS seized control of Mosul, in 2014,
initially ached to return to a once-flourishing commercial center with a
famous university and a legendary Old City. But the mood has shifted
after three years of polarizing ISIS occupation, epic bloodshed,
deepening sectarian tensions, and miles of utter destruction. Mosul is
unlikely to be put back together—socially, politically, or
physically—anytime soon.
Kandes, like many, does not want to go home. She is wary of more
violence, notably from ISIS sleeper cells still hiding in Mosul. Suicide
bombs have killed hundreds of civilians living in areas controlled by
the government, including the capital, Baghdad.
“Although the city of Mosul has been declared ‘retaken’ by the Iraqi
government, agencies warn that civilians across Iraq are still not out
of harm’s way,” the International Rescue Committee warned, on Sunday.
“Even in areas where ISIL has been gone for over a year, the conditions
for safe and voluntary returns are still not being met.”
Kandes also fears a cycle of revenge attacks that will pit
government-sanctioned Shiite militias of the Popular Mobilization
Forces, which were part of the fight against ISIS, against Sunnis who
lived under the Islamic State. “ISIS ruined the reputation of Sunnis,”
she said. “Not all Sunnis are bad. We are good Sunnis. We are educated.
We love life.”
Her brother, younger by a year, interjected. “We learned English not
from school but from movies. ‘Fast and Furious’ is my favorite,” he
said. “I was very sorry when Paul Walker died. When we had no TV, no
Internet under ISIS—I watched movies on my phone.”
Because of their injuries—both her father and brother require long-term
treatment—the family has residence permits to remain in Kurdistan. The
majority of families who fled ISIS are stuck in camps in the Kurdish
provinces that will eventually be dismantled. Kandes, the only family
member physically capable of working, is now looking for a job. As a
safeguard, she is keeping her alias, for now.
“I never want to see Mosul again,” she told me by phone a few days ago.
“There is no political solution now. Iraq is like a glass of water. Once
you break the glass, how do you collect the water again?”
Saad Kamal Hussein, his wife, and their six kids have lived in a
one-room cinderblock shanty since they fled the ISIS blitz on a town
outside Mosul three years ago. Their barren home has a tarp roof, an
outdoor cooking area, and a latrine shared with other families. They
live alongside eight hundred other families in similar shanties off the
dusty alleys of Camp
Baharka. They
are “Internally Displaced People,” or I.D.P.s, who stay inside their
countries rather than become refugees abroad. Camp Baharka is on the
outskirts of Erbil, in northern Kurdistan. The Husseins’ only furniture
are mats that they unroll at night; they sleep, back-to-back, on the
floor. Their children range in age from four to seventeen. The little ones’
only toys are domesticated pigeons. The flock has grown from two to
twenty since I first visited the camp last year.
Hussein doesn’t want to go back to Mosul, either. “My house is still
standing, but everything else is gone,” he told me, when I visited them
again earlier this year. “I have no money to buy a refrigerator or
furniture. ISIS took some things. Arabs took the rest.” Hussein worked
in plastics, making frames and beads for bracelets. He showed me a few
that looked like tiger’s eye. He has been unemployed for three years, and
there’s no prospect of a job for him anytime soon. “At least we have
water and some electricity in this camp,” he told me, as we sat in a
tiny dirt patch he referred to as his “garden.”
Other issues worry him more. During its three-year rule, ISIS unravelled
the social fabric in and around Mosul, which was once a melting pot of
cultures, sects, and ethnicities. Now few trust each other. The
Husseins are Shabak, a minority that is ethnically closest to the Kurds,
with a belief system associated with Shiism, although it is actually
syncretic, combining elements of Islam, Christianity, and Yazidism. Camp
Baharka is home to several minorities, including Shabak, Turkmen, Kurds,
and Yazidis. “Most people who have been through the ISIS experience
don’t want to go back,” Hussein told me. He also doesn’t trust Iraq’s
central government to protect and provide for minorities.
“We won’t go back if the Arabs are in control,” Hussein said. “We’ve had
enough. We don’t want to be part of Iraq anymore.” He told me he wants
to stay in Kurdistan, which is scheduled to hold a referendum in
September on independence from Iraq. In the long term, he doesn’t
believe the country will hold together because of strife among its
disparate factions that began after the U.S. invasion and deepened under
ISIS.
“Iraq will never be the same again,” he said.
I met Salam Ablaha at the outdoor grocery stand he runs across from the
Ashti-2 Camp for displaced Christians in Erbil. He fled Hamdaniya, a
heavily Christian district near Mosul, three years ago. He is an
Assyrian Christian. In March of this year, he told me that he would
never return as well. As the Iraqi Army made its final push against
ISIS, I called him a few days ago to see if he might have changed his
mind in the euphoria of liberation.
“Hamdaniya is the best place on Earth,” he replied. “I have in-laws in
Germany who told me that they’d return if Hamdaniya goes back to the way
it was. Jesus Christ told us not to be afraid, to turn the other cheek.
My biggest problem is that Christians are surrounded by Muslims and
there’s no protection. Look what happened to us under ISIS. The
Christian community is too small to protect itself.”
The practical problem is that he has nothing to return to: ISIS torched
his house. “Half the city was burned down,” he told me.
The fight to liberate Mosul has been compared to the most intense
battles of the Second World War. The destruction, especially in West
Mosul, is vast. Every major intersection was bombed by the U.S.-led
coalition, mainly to slow or block suicide bombers from driving into
advancing columns of the Iraqi Army. The bridges spanning the Tigris,
which link the eastern and western halves of the city, were destroyed.
Iraqi Army artillery fire and ISIS bombs damaged almost every block. The
city’s infrastructure and public services will have to be rebuilt from
scratch. The damage is in the tens of billions of dollars, Iraqi
officials told me.
“Nearly every building on the western side of Mosul was completely
destroyed. With this level of devastation, it’s very unlikely that the
hundreds of thousands of displaced families will be going home anytime
soon,” Arnaud Quemin, the interim country director for Mercy Corps in
Iraq, said in a statement, on Tuesday.
Some displaced people have returned, reluctantly, to Mosul, Ablaha told
me, because the local government said they would have to come back soon
to reclaim jobs—and paychecks—from before the ISIS takeover.
“But it’ll take five years to fix the city, at least. What are we
supposed to do until then?” Ablaha asked. “It’s time to build a future
somewhere else.” He now wants to leave Iraq altogether.