Mosul

Overview

Mosul is a major city of northern Iraq, situated on both banks of the Tigris. It is the capital of Nineveh Governorate, which includes most of the Nineveh Plains. The historic Old City occupies part of the western bank, while much of the eastern bank has broader streets and more recent development. Mosul’s location made it a regional center for administration, trade and movement between Iraq, Kurdistan and neighboring areas. Before the upheaval that began in 2014, its population was commonly described as approaching two million, although estimates differed and subsequent displacement made any fixed figure unreliable.

Mosul’s history includes Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, alongside the wider region’s Kurds and Yazidis. Its medieval Jewish community was substantial; nearly all its Jews migrated to Israel between 1950 and 1955. Churches, monasteries and the twelfth-century al-Nuri Mosque testify to other layers of the city’s history. The Old City became the setting for the final, most destructive stage of the Battle of Mosul. The battle ended approximately three years of rule by the Islamic State, a terrorist organization that had made Mosul the principal Iraqi center of its territorial caliphate.

Geography

The Tigris divides Mosul into eastern and western districts and links the city’s geography to its political and military history. Bridges connect the two banks. The Old City lies west of the river, where dense streets and closely built neighborhoods shaped daily life and later complicated combat. The al-Nuri Mosque and its leaning al-Hadba minaret stood at the heart of this historic urban landscape. East Mosul’s wider roads and newer districts gave it a different character and, during the 2016–2017 battle, contributed to a different pattern of fighting and damage.

Mosul is the administrative center of Nineveh Governorate. The Nineveh Plains to its north and east are home to longstanding Assyrian Christian communities and other minorities. The wider governorate also includes areas associated with Yazidis, notably around Sinjar. Erbil, a major center of the Kurdistan Region, lies to Mosul’s east. These connections made approaches across the Nineveh Plains and near Makhmour important in both the Islamic State’s 2014 advance and the later campaign to retake the city. They also meant that the collapse of Mosul’s defenses endangered communities far beyond its municipal boundaries.

The river’s crossings acquired particular importance during the battle for Mosul. Iraqi forces advanced first through eastern neighborhoods and then fought toward the western districts and Old City. Islamic State fighters sought routes across the Tigris as their positions in the east contracted. In January 2017, American forces destroyed ten Islamic State boats to prevent river crossings, while Iraqi security forces fought for control of bridges linking the city’s two halves. The separation between banks also shaped recovery: many displaced residents first returned to eastern districts, which had generally suffered less damage than the west.

Ancient and biblical history

Mosul stands close to the site of ancient Nineveh, on the opposite side of the Tigris. Nineveh was a major city of Assyria, and the relationship between its site and later Mosul is central to the area’s historical identity. Jewish historical accounts associate settlement in the vicinity with Assyria’s conquest of Samaria in the eighth century BCE. That association concerns ancient Nineveh and its surroundings; it does not make the modern city identical to the Assyrian capital. The long continuity of habitation in the area nevertheless helps explain why Mosul and the Nineveh Plains preserve sites important to several religious and cultural traditions.

In the medieval period, Mosul became an important city of northern Mesopotamia. The al-Nuri Mosque, built in the second half of the twelfth century, developed into a central institution in the Old City. Its leaning al-Hadba minaret became one of Mosul’s best-known landmarks. Mosul also formed part of the world through which Jewish travelers described established communities and through which rulers contested control of northern Iraq. During sixteenth-century Ottoman campaigns, the princes of Soran and Cizre seized Mosul and Kirkuk in the Ottomans’ name. Sultan Selim I conquered Mosul with Kurdish assistance in 1517, beginning roughly four centuries of Ottoman control. Before the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, the territory of present-day Iraq was divided among provinces centered on Mosul, Baghdad and Basra.

Jewish history

Mosul has a long place in the history of the Jews in Iraq. By the middle of the seventh century CE, a Jewish community lived in Mahallat al-Yahūd, the Jewish Quarter. In the mid-tenth century, the Jewish philosopher Ibn Abi Saʿīd ibn Uthmān Saʿīd al-Mawṣilī lived in the city. These records show an established community well before the better-documented medieval period. Its history formed part of the wider Jewish presence in Mesopotamia, while retaining a distinct local character tied to Mosul’s neighborhoods, schools and commerce.

The community grew in the first half of the twelfth century under the principality ruled by Atabeg Zangī and his sons. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited before 1170, reported approximately 7,000 Jews in Mosul and named R. Zakkai and R. Joseph among its leaders. About a decade later, Pethahiah of Regensburg found more than 6,000 Jews there. Such travelers’ counts are historical reports rather than modern censuses, but both describe a large and organized community. Jewish life continued through later changes of rule and economic conditions.

By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mosul’s Jews remained concentrated largely in their own neighborhood. Benjamin II reported 450 Jewish families in 1848. Economic decline contributed to departures for Baghdad, yet the community persisted. The Alliance Israélite Universelle established a boys’ school in 1906 and a girls’ school in 1912; both closed when the First World War began. Around 1930, schools for boys and girls were established through the philanthropy of Eliezer Kadoorie. The 1947 census recorded 5,688 Jews in Mosul. From 1950 to 1955, nearly all migrated to Israel, bringing the city’s longstanding Jewish communal life close to an end.

Modern history

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Mosul became a center of armed insurgency during the 2000s. Former servicemen left unemployed by the collapse of the old state were among those living in the city. Networks linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq used Mosul for logistics and fundraising; its successor, the Islamic State, later drew on that foothold. Mosul was also home to prominent Sunni politicians, including parliamentary speaker Osama Nujaifi and his brother Atheel Nujaifi, governor of Nineveh. These political and security developments formed the immediate background to the city’s fall in 2014.

Christians faced danger before the Islamic State’s arrival. Two Christian men were shot dead in separate Mosul attacks on January 17 and 18, 2010. On February 25, the Chaldean archbishop described a humanitarian emergency as hundreds of Christian families fled, leaving homes, property and businesses. Further attacks that spring included a bomb near a Christian family’s home and an explosion targeting buses carrying Christian students to the University of Mosul. Assyrian and other Christian communities in Mosul and the Nineveh Plains were already under severe pressure when the Islamic State began its offensive. Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf later stressed the need for law as a condition of Christian life in the area.

The fall of Mosul followed an assault in which Iraqi security forces collapsed across the city and surrounding Nineveh Plains. Several competing security forces had operated in the area. Many Iraqi army brigades were already badly understrength, and cohesion and readiness had declined over preceding years. Three days of escalating fighting in western Mosul gave Islamic State forces psychological dominance. Defending formations, including Nineveh-based army divisions and Mosul’s 3rd Federal Police division, disintegrated. The city fell in about 48 hours, on June 10, 2014. Across the wider crisis, 25 army and Federal Police brigades disintegrated, while 60 brigades survived. The defeat was grave, but it did not eliminate Iraq’s security forces.

The loss opened routes south and deepened Iraq’s political crisis. Two days later, Islamic State fighters murdered more than 1,000 Shiite Iraqi cadets at Camp Speicher. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called young men to arms against the organization. Kurdish Peshmerga established control in some territories as Iraqi positions collapsed, while the Kurdistan Regional Government kept an open door for people fleeing Mosul and Anbar despite limited capacity to assist them. Baghdad was threatened, but its much larger population and concentration of regular forces and militias made its circumstances different from those that had enabled Mosul’s rapid fall.

Security

The Islamic State’s seizure of Mosul gave it a large city, substantial resources and a powerful symbol. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used Mosul to declare the organization’s caliphate in 2014. The city became a center of its rule, funding, recruitment and propaganda. As the organization consolidated control, more than half of Mosul’s residents fled. Its advance engulfed the Nineveh Plains and brought catastrophic persecution of Christians and other minorities. In Mosul, Christians were ordered to convert, pay jizya, flee or die. The organization destroyed churches and the Monastery of Saint Elijah, regarded as Iraq’s oldest monastery. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned the forced displacement of Mosul’s Christians in 2014.

The Islamic State’s campaign in the surrounding region also targeted Yazidis. Its assault on Sinjar involved mass killing, enslavement and displacement, and became central to the Yazidi genocide. Mosul and the wider governorate thus became connected to atrocities against both city residents and communities beyond the city. The flight of civilians strained the Kurdistan Region and other places receiving displaced families. Preserving the area’s Christian churches and monasteries, alongside the Yazidi temple at Lalish, became part of the longer task of recovering minority heritage after Islamic State rule.

Iraq lacked enough ready forces for an immediate decisive offensive against Mosul. In 2015, its government delayed the campaign and prioritized operations in Anbar, where it could use available forces and develop cooperation with local Sunni groups. Preparations for Mosul then advanced in stages. The first phase of the Fatah operation pushed the front near Makhmour, southeast of the city. By June 2016, the Iraqi Army was preparing an approach from Qayyarah to the south. Kurdish leaders supported the army’s advance near Makhmour while seeking to keep the Popular Mobilization Forces away from Kurdistan’s borders. Ahead of the main battle, al-Baghdadi released an audio message urging followers to hold Mosul.

On October 17, 2016, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the campaign to retake Mosul, the Islamic State’s last major stronghold in Iraq. Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga led the operation, supported by Sunni tribesmen, Shiite militias and aircraft of the American-led coalition. The initial advance came through the Nineveh Plains and approaches to the city. Islamic State fighters resisted with snipers, booby traps, tunnels and attacks on advancing troops. In November, intense fighting developed on the eastern outskirts. Meanwhile, Shiite militias advanced toward Tal Afar, threatening routes between Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria.

The battle’s eastern phase took months. Iraqi Special Operations Forces suffered severe losses, reducing the number of elite troops available for the later western campaign. On January 15, 2017, the Iraqi Army announced control of 90 percent of Mosul’s eastern bank. Islamic State fighters retreated toward a northern Tigris bridge, seeking to cross westward. Iraqi forces continued securing neighborhoods and river crossings before shifting the main assault to western Mosul. Conditions there were harder: dense streets, a large civilian population and Islamic State defenses made advances slow and dangerous.

Civilians remained at grave risk throughout the western battle. Many fled as Iraqi forces advanced and were processed into displacement camps. Others remained trapped amid fighting, explosives and the Islamic State’s use of civilians near its positions. On May 27, 2017, Iraqi forces attacked the Old City and three adjoining areas near the Tigris’s western bank. They distributed leaflets urging residents to leave before the final assault. In early June, fighting centered on Al-Zanjili, north of the Old City, where Iraqi forces had retaken about one-third of the neighborhood. Iraqi security forces continued taking western districts as the battle entered its final stage.

Coalition operations also caused civilian deaths and required investigation of particular incidents. In the March 17 Al-Jadida incident, an American airstrike struck its intended Islamic State target. A U.S. Defense Department investigation found that Islamic State fighters detonated planted explosives after the strike, producing a secondary explosion that killed 107 civilians. Investigators found that pro-government forces had not known those explosives were present. The incident illustrates both the battle’s grave civilian cost and the need to distinguish a strike’s intended target, the precautions available at the time and the cause of the fatal explosion.

Iraqi forces, backed by the American-led coalition, defeated the Islamic State in Mosul in 2017. The victory dealt a severe blow to its territorial caliphate and preceded the loss of other areas under its control. It did not end the organization’s ability to carry out attacks: fighters remained active elsewhere, including around Tal Afar. Iraqi security forces then faced the dangerous work of removing mines, booby traps and abandoned weapons. Computers, hard drives and other Islamic State records recovered in Mosul yielded names used by international border authorities to identify suspected operatives. The battle also left unresolved questions about armed groups that had gained territory and influence during the campaign.

Present day

Mosul’s recovery began amid extensive destruction. Damaged homes created a housing shortage, while broken water infrastructure disrupted supply. Generators provided temporary electricity where the regular system had failed. Displaced people began returning, chiefly to eastern districts that had suffered less damage. In the west, rebuilding the Old City required clearance of explosives as well as repair of streets, housing and public services. Recovery also involved the lives and institutions of communities whose members had been killed, expelled or scattered during Islamic State rule.

Heritage restoration became a visible part of that work. The Islamic State destroyed the al-Hadba minaret of the twelfth-century al-Nuri Mosque during the final battle. Reconstructing the leaning minaret and repairing the mosque marked a major step in the Old City’s recovery. The project restored a landmark closely identified with Mosul’s urban history, while preservation efforts elsewhere in the region addressed Christian churches, monasteries and Yazidi sites. Physical reconstruction could not by itself reverse the losses suffered by those communities.

Security and governance remained unsettled after liberation. Militias controlled some Nineveh Plains checkpoints, reconstruction contracts and parts of the Mosul–Erbil trade corridor, constraining Christian communities’ return. Prime Minister al-Abadi’s August 2, 2018 executive order 1388 required Popular Mobilization Forces units to leave Mosul and the Nineveh Plains and come under the army-led Nineveh Operations Command. Debate also continued over whether Nineveh should be reorganized into a region with new provinces. Iranian-backed militias’ role in the campaign and the continuing Islamic State threat kept wider questions of Iraqi sovereignty and security open. In September 2021, Iranian consul general Nasrollah Rashnoudi visited Nineveh Province to promote the Iranian regime’s role in rebuilding Mosul.

Mosul’s years under Islamic State rule also became a subject of public memory and propaganda. Netflix released the film Mosul, depicting the city’s liberation, on November 26, 2020. Islamic State supporters quickly answered with a video titled War and Media that celebrated the city’s fall and the organization’s period of control. For Mosul’s residents, the more enduring measures of recovery remain safe homes, reliable services, restored cultural sites and the ability of displaced communities to return under effective law and security.