Revealed: Blogger on life in Mosul under IS
ASSOCIATED PRESS: He would wander the streets of occupied Mosul by day, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by the extremists. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and stonings, so he could hear killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.
By night, anonymously from his darkened room, Mosul Eye told the world what was happening. If caught, he too would be killed. But after more than three years, his double life has grown too heavy to bear. He misses his name. His secrets consume him, sap energy he’d rather use for his doctoral dissertation and for helping Mosul rebuild. In conversations with The Associated Press, he agonised over how to end the anonymity that plagues him. He made his decision.
Mosul Eye is Omar Mohammed, historian, scholar, blogger. He is 31.
The revelation of his identity is for his thousands of readers and followers, for all his volunteers in Mosul inspired by a man they have never seen. But above all, it is for the brother who died in the final battle and for his grieving mother. “I can’t be anonymous anymore. This is to say that I defeated ISIS. You can see me now, and you can know me now,” he told AP.
Mohammed first posted about the IS under his own Facebook account, in the first few days after its fighters swept into Mosul, but a friend told him he risked being killed. So in those first days he made himself a promise: trust no one, document everything.
A newly minted teacher with a reputation for secular ideas, he had lost his university job. He found another calling. “My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my personal opinion to myself,” he wrote on that first day, June 18, 2014.
Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about IS fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself. During Friday sermons, Mohammed feigned enthusiasm.
He collected propaganda to post online later. Much of what he collected went on the blog. Other details he kept in his computer, for fear of giving away his identity. Someday, he promised, he would write history with them.