A Clandestine History of Mosul Under the Islamic State

When ISIS overran Mosul in June 2014, a young historian expected to spend his life in archives, not hiding from a death sentence. His ambition had been quiet: to write history, teach students, and preserve his city's past. But within days, Mosul was sealed off from the world—its streets patrolled, its memory suffocating under propaganda—and he found himself forced into a role he had never imagined.

From a small room no one ever saw, under a name no one knew, he created Mosul Eye. What began as a personal attempt to record the first days of the occupation became, without his knowing it, the only reliable source from inside the terror state. Every detail he wrote—checkpoints, executions, heritage destruction, forbidden rumors—was a risk. Every sentence could have exposed him. ISIS hunted him relentlessly, promising to kill him in a manner “humanity had not yet discovered.”

But he survived. And the archive he built survived with him.

Only years later would he discover that his secret reports, written by generator light to the sound of drones overhead, were being read not only by his neighbors and the world's newspapers—but by governments, analysts, and intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which relied on his work as one of the finest inside sources produced during the occupation.

Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s War Against ISIS is the story of how a quiet scholar became the most elusive witness to one of the darkest chapters of the 21st century, and how knowledge, discipline, and truth outlasted a terror state.