It was the simple night-time act of watering flowers on his street in Mosul’s Old City that made Saqr Zakaria stop and think about just how safe this last bastion of Islamic State militants had become since it was liberated in 2017.
“I thought for a second: ‘Where am I?’” said Zakaria, who left the city in 2005, but returned to set up a cultural center, the Baytna Foundation, in 2018 at a time when thousands of bodies were still being cleared from the ruins.
The jihadist group declared its caliphate at the Grand al-Nuri Mosque just down the road after taking Mosul a decade ago, imposing an extreme form of Islam that saw them kill members of minority groups, ban music and destroy archeological sites.
Photo: Reuters
The maze of alleyways in this part of the city on the west bank of the Tigris River became a site of regular killings, kidnappings and crime with the rise of Islamist insurgents after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Much of it was pulverized, and thousands of civilians were killed, in the battle to free it.
However, despite political infighting, allegations of corruption and delayed reconstruction, life is returning on both sides of the river.
Many of the more than two dozen people who spoke to a Reuters reporter on a four-night visit to the city said they felt more secure today than at any time in the past two decades.
“Life consisted of eating and sleeping and locking your door so you’re not kidnapped or killed or blown up. We were deprived, and today we are making that up,” Zakaria said.
His foundation, housed in a traditional Moslawi home with an inner courtyard, has become a leading attraction for local and foreign visitors, including French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021.
Shortly after he spoke, an elderly man walked into the courtyard and shed tears at the sight of pictures, hung on a wall, of the city’s intellectual and cultural elite that harkened back to better days.
“This is Mosul,” said Nizar al-Khayat, a former school director in his 70s, his voice wavering. “No matter what, it remains a cultured, civilized city.”
Local officials and residents say there is a long way to go before Mosul sheds the legacy of Islamic State rule.
Rubble is still being cleared seven years after the city was liberated. Pockmarked buildings with collapsed floors and exposed rebar can still be seen around Mosul. The Old City is in ruins.
However, bridges have gone up. New restaurants have opened where patrons tuck into Lebanese cuisine and sway their heads to the nostalgic sound of Syrian tenors.
A souk and curbside cafes by the river buzz with life late into the night, formerly unthinkable in a city where people locked themselves in their homes by late afternoon.
Even as the city works to restore basic infrastructure, it is focused on expanding green areas and touristic attractions like a new riverside corniche, said Firas al-Sultan, a technical adviser to Mosul municipality.
Monuments to the city’s rich inter-faith history, like the Grand Nuri Mosque and al-Tahera Church visited by Pope Francis in 2021, are being rebuilt.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real