On June 10, 2014, the city of Mosul—Iraq’s second largest, home to nearly two million people, built on and around the ruins of the Assyrian capital Nineveh—fell to the Islamic State in a single night. The Iraqi Army dissolved. Soldiers abandoned their uniforms in the streets. By morning, a city that had been continuously inhabited for seven thousand years belonged to a force that intended to abolish everything it had been.
I was inside the city when it fell. I am a historian. When ISIS took Mosul, I made a choice that would define the next three years of my life and reshape everything I understood about myself. I stayed. I documented. I refused to let the occupiers become the sole authors of what was happening to my city.
What followed—what I built, what I carried, what I lost, and what it did to me—is this book.
It is not a policy analysis, though it contains evidence that policymakers will need. It is not a military history, though it documents the largest urban battle of the twenty-first century. It is not a spy memoir, though the work it describes required deception, concealment, and the daily possibility of death.
It is the record of a historian who was compelled by the fall of his city to become something he had never intended to be. I have written it because the record demands it. Because the dead deserve to be counted by someone who knew them as people, not as categories. And because someone should say, clearly and without evasion, what it costs a human being to carry a city’s truth through three years of terror and come out the other side uncertain whether the man who came out is the same man who went in.
Trust no one. Document everything.
That was the rule. This is the book.
—Omar Mohammed
Paris, 2026
(Preface to his book Mosul Eye)