Defense One | By: Jack Watling | July 11, 2017:
On Sunday, Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister of Iraq, visited Mosul to herald the success of his army’s nine-month struggle to recapture the city from the Islamic State. In a speech on state television the next day, he declared “the end and the failure and the collapse of the terrorist state of falsehood and terrorism which [ISIS] announced from Mosul.”
Even as pockets of militants continue to hold out in the Old City, the government is now effectively in control of both East and West Mosul. The capture of the Great Mosque of al Nuri, which sits at the heart of the Old City, on the west bank of the Tigris river, was a symbolic victory, since it was from this mosque that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Islamic State, declared the foundation of the caliphate.
But the mosque also represents the scale of the challenge now facing Iraq.
Before its capture, ISIS fighters blew up its iconic leaning minaret— an act described by Abadi as “an official acknowledgment of defeat.”
At its height, ISIS controlled 40 percent of Iraqi territory, terrorizing a population of 10 million. The recapture of that territory, with only the towns of Hawija and Tal Afar remaining in ISIS hands, has seen the displacement of 3 million people, and over 13,000 coalition airstrikes. Combined with ISIS’s penchant for systematically carpeting towns with IEDs, a vast swathe of Iraq, including the al-Nuri Mosque, lies in ruins.
Prior to falling to ISIS in June 2014, Mosul was a center for medium-sized Iraqi industries. The city hosted pharmaceutical factories, and an abundance of craftsmen who made furniture, instruments, leather goods, and textiles. ISIS repurposed many of the city’s workshops to produce IEDs. Consequently they have been devastated in the fighting. Mosul’s modern pharmaceuticals factory, for example, was bombed in 2016 by the coalition, after it was linked to the manufacture of chemical weapons by ISIS. The restoration of these industries is crucial to bringing the city back to life.
What emerges from the rubble will determine the future of Iraq.
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