Mosul victory leaves survivors reeling: ‘We got our city back, but there is nothing for me in it’

MOSUL, Iraq – As Iraq’s prime minister prepared to declare victory against the Islamic State in Mosul on Monday, millions of leaflets fluttered through the skies with a promise from the government to its people that the city would never be alone again.

Across the country, the party had already started. There was dancing in the streets of Baghdad. In the southern city of Basra, fireworks crackled late into the night.

Defeat in this northern city is a heavy blow for the Islamic State, robbing the group of one of its most important strongholds and dashing its dream of running a proto-state. But viewed from the ground, Iraq’s victory is a messy business.

No one knows have many people have died here during nine grueling months of urban warfare. Half the city’s population has been displaced, and across Mosul’s western districts, the most populous neighborhoods are now shattered beyond repair.

Sitting still and alone amid the chaos of an aid distribution point this week, Shaimaa, 17, said she had escaped the fighting alone.

Her three brothers were hauled off to an Islamic State prison last year and remain missing. Her sister died in a bombing. And her parents?

“There was an airstrike,” she said, and that was the last time she saw her mother. “I saw my father’s body in the rubble and I walked away. We got our city back, but there is nothing for me in it.”

Every family around her said they had lost someone to an airstrike or Islamic State shelling. Sometimes that meant one child; other times it meant five.

Looking back, the fight to retake the city now resembles two separate battles. First, Iraqi security forces took the eastern half of the city. Then they moved on the more densely populated west, relying more heavily on U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and taking heavy casualties as they went.

The eastern districts have sprung back to life. Fruit-sellers line the roads, peddling melons and mulberries in the heat of the day. And shops run a roaring trade, packed at lunchtime, and bustling with life as the sun sets.

But cross the Tigris River heading west, and the cityscape shatters into an ugly sea of broken buildings.

In the Old City, a final redoubt for Islamic State militants this week, it can be hard to tell where one structure ended and another began.

The only way through some alleyways is over the top of those homes. And as you clamber, you see remnants of the lives they once held. Baby clothes, wheelchairs and a cheese grater were mixed into the rubble of one house. The stench of rotting flesh suggested the occupants were still there, too – buried, somewhere, deep under the rubble.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris River, an old fairground has been turned into a screening point to stop Islamic State fighters leaving among the civilians. Inside an old bumper-car rink, dozens of men sat in rows last week and waited for their judgment. Military intelligence officers in balaclavas sporadically moved among them to pull out an evacuee accused of working with the militants.

Some went quietly. Others wanted a fight.

“I swear I only prayed in their mosque. I have nothing to do with them,” shouted one man, his back covered in what appeared to be fresh welts.

Speaking from behind his face covering, a thick-set officer waved his colleagues to drag the man away.

“You were walking through the streets with your gun. We saw you,” he said. And then the man hung his head and cried.