In Mosul

Six years after Islamic State was defeated in Mosul, the city’s homes, mosques, churches and cultural sites are still in the process of being put back together. It is at times difficult to distinguish the legacy of the battle – the bombed-out houses and their exposed iron rebars, or the spaces where bedraggled brown grass is working its way up through mounds of collapsed concrete – from the excavation sites. In some cases, they overlap.

One mosque, al-Masfi, was used as a storeroom by IS when they occupied the city from 2014 to 2017. Its configuration is unusual: the minaret is about half a block from the small prayer hall, separated by houses that were destroyed in the battle. They are believed to have been built on the footprint of a much older structure, possibly dating from 638. That would make al-Masfi the oldest mosque in Mosul and the third oldest in the world, built only six years after the death of Mohammed. Archaeologists are digging under and around the war-damaged structure to verify the claim, but progress is slow. Every week the Iraqi army comes to take away the rubble, which may contain mines or live ordnance.

Most streets are passable now, but it will probably take ten years to clear Mosul of all the mines that IS laid as their parting gift to the city. Graffiti in Arabic and English mark each house in the Old City as checked, and building sites are full of neat little piles of rubble with white flags reading ‘Safe’. Two deminers from the US company Tetra Tech who began working in Mosul only last year told me that they have removed 35,665 munitions, from IEDs to suicide vests.

There are regular checkpoints on the eighty-kilometre road from Erbil. I travelled with a delegation led by the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH). When we crossed out of Iraqi Kurdistan our security escort stopped by the side of the road to put on flak jackets and fish their Kalashnikovs from the boot. We had body armour to wear too, and on the first day we arrived at a church in Qaraqosh in our chunky vests. ‘Please, no!’ one of the community organisers said. ‘Those are a sign of war – we are at peace.’ We took the jackets off, though we were protected at all times by our Kurdish guards who kept theirs on, as we walked the streets, peering into mosques and churches to survey the damage.

The security is precautionary: there have been no incidents over the past few years, but a delegation of foreigners would be a high-value kidnapping target for any remaining IS fighters. We were there to attend a press conference at the Mosul Cultural Museum announcing the next stage in its rehabilitation, after its contents were destroyed by IS. The event hadn’t been widely signposted but was attended by the culture minister and the head of the State Board of Architecture and Heritage, raising its security risk. Other visitors and journalists come to Mosul without any security protection. Iraq began a visa-on-arrival service last year, and at Mosul Heritage – a community-led museum overlooking the Tigris – we met a backpacker from Manchester and his American girlfriend.

Most of the support for Mosul’s cultural projects comes from abroad: ALIPH, the Louvre, the Smithsonian and the World Monuments Fund are collaborating on the Mosul museum, while the project is overseen by the Iraqi state. Unesco, with funds from the UAE, is rebuilding the al-Nuri mosque, whose leaning minaret – now destroyed – appears on the ten thousand dinar banknote. Unesco is also funding the reconstruction of the church of Our Lady of the Hour, whose bells are said to talk to the adhan from the al-Nuri minaret. ALIPH – an international agency supported by France, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, among others – is paying for the restoration of the House of Prayer next to the church, the site of the first girls’ school in the region.

We met a group of young Iraqis at the Baytna Foundation, one of the few local cultural NGOs in Mosul. They had all lived through the IS occupation, though most had escaped before the siege itself, and had returned to the city with their families and set up Baytna in a former private home. They have turned the rooms into exhibits of material culture: the ornately carved hanging cradles that are still sold on the roadsides; old matchbooks, telephones, fans, candelabras and cameras; an entrance room arranged in traditional style. Upstairs, overlooking the central courtyard, is an eating area where the group host concerts, readings and school visits. The organisers, born after the US-led invasion, were children during the IS occupation and are in their teens and early twenties now – young to be taking on the role of memory-keepers.

The Mosul Cultural Museum will reopen in 2026, following the architect Mohamed Makiya’s original plans from the 1970s. But the Assyrian gallery, where IS detonated TNT belowa ninth-century BCE Assyrian throne platform, and destroyed a lion from Nimrod and two winged lamassu, will stay shut, visible only from the other galleries. Amid the restored stone sculptures, the gaping hole caused by the explosion will remain in the floor.