THE DOUBLE LIFE OF A MOSUL MAN WHO HELPED DEFEAT ISIL
▶ For more than three years, Omar Mohammed kept meticulous records of the atrocities commited by ISIL in his beloved Mosul. Now, after years of living in fear of being identified, he has decided to reveal his name
The night before he left, he packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, the first book to be delivered by Amazon to Mosul, and the one terabyte hard drive with his evidence against ISIL.
He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city and the home he had shared with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor to tell her he was leaving.
“Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He could not endanger her by telling her any more – just as he could not tell her about the life he had led since ISIL invaded their city. As he headed out to the waiting Chevrolet, he did not look back.
For nearly two years, he had wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and ISIL fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew his hair and his beard and wore shortened trousers, as prescribed by ISIL. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.
He was not a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger. As ISIL turned the city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths. He knew that if he was caught he too would be executed.
“I am writing this for the history, because I know this will end. People will return, life will go back to normal,” is how he explained the blog that was his conduit to the citizens of Mosul and the world beyond.
“After many years, there will be people who will study what happened. The city deserves to have something written to defend the city and tell the truth, because they say that when the war begins, the first victim is the truth.”
He called himself Mosul Eye and made a pact with himself: trust no one, document everything. No one could identify him – not his family, not friends, not ISIL.
His readership grew by the thousand every month.
But now, he was running for his life, and it meant passing through one ISIL checkpoint after another, and praying that the extremists would not stop him, or find that hard drive containing evidence of their atrocities, the names of collaborators and fighters, and unmask the man they had been trying to silence ever since they first swept in.
From the beginning, Mosul Eye wrote simultaneously as a witness and a historian.
Born during the Iran-Iraq war in 1986, he had come of age during a second war, when Saddam Hussein fell and the Americans took over. At 17, he remembers attending a meeting of extremists at the mosque and hearing them talk about “fighting the crusaders”.
“To be honest, I didn’t understand.”
As for the Americans, whose language he already spoke haltingly, he could not understand why they would come all the way from the United States to Mosul.
He thought studying history would give him the answers.
The men in black came from the north, sweeping though his neighbourhood in new all-terrain Toyotas.
At first he thought they would fade away, like other militants he had seen in Mosul.
But in the midst of pitched battle, these fanatics hunted down and killed 70 people on their target list and in June 2014 hung enormous banners announcing their arrival.
By then, the historian was a newly qualified teacher.
At a staff meeting at Mosul University, the conquerors explained the ISIL education system. All classes would be based upon the strictest interpretation of the Quran.
To a man who had been accused of secularism during the viva for his master’s thesis, it felt like the end of his career.
At first, he posted observations on his personal Facebook page, until a friend warned him that he risked being killed.
But the transformative power of war bewildered him. On June 18, 2014, a week after the city fell, Mosul Eye was born.
“My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my opinion to myself,” he wrote. “I will only communicate the facts I see.”
By day, he chatted with ISIL fighters and vendors, and observed. By night, he wrote his blog in his native Arabic and fluent English. Later he also wrote on Facebook and Twitter.
Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about ISIL’s activities, and especially the things ISIL wanted kept secret.
“They were organised as a killing machine. They are thirsty [for] blood and money and women.”
He attended Friday sermons with feigned enthusiasm. He collected and posted propaganda leaflets, including one on July 27, 2014, that claimed the ISIL leader was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. Back home, he decried the leaflet as a blatant attempt “to distort history” to justify the fanatics’ actions.
Over many glasses of tea, he talked to hospital workers, posting what he learnt online.
Some details he kept in his computer, for fear they would give away his identity. Someday, he told himself, he would write Mosul’s history using these documents.
The most sensitive information initially came from two old friends: one a doctor and the other a high school dropout-turned-taxi driver who still burned with resentment over his detention by a Shiite militia in 2008, and who had embraced ISIL’s extreme interpretation of religion. He swiftly joined an intelligence unit in Mosul, becoming “one of the monsters of ISIL” – and could not resist bragging about his insider knowledge.
Once he corroborated the details and masked the sources, Mosul Eye put it out for the world to read.
Sometimes he included photos of the fighters and commanders, complete with biographies pieced together over days of surreptitious information-gathering during the course of his normal life as an out-of-work scholar.
“I used the two characters, the two personalities to serve each other,” he said. He also took on other identities on Facebook, and they started to take on a life of their own. One was the funny, knowledgeable Mouris Milton, whom he came to regard as a better version of himself. Ibn Al Athir Al Mawsilli, a coldly logical historian, was another.
International media soon picked up on Mosul Eye and