Hope and fear in Mosul’s liberated district

AL-ZUHUR, Mosul-- Haji Khalid, the local imam in Mosul's contested neighborhood of Zuhur, welcomes a group of Iraqi soldiers in his home with warm tea filled with lots of sugar.

"May God lead you to victory," the imam tells his exhausted guests who have just completed a mission searching for the remaining Islamic State militants in his district.

Only two days earlier, the militants were the peerless rulers of this neighborhood, and despite the army's upper hand, it would be too soon to call a winner here as the door to door battle still continues for the third consecutive night.

Naturally, the pragmatic imam takes a cautious approach in addressing the recent dilemma that has gripped his beloved neighborhood.

"I would dare to say that up to 90 percent of the Daesh militants in Zuhur were men recruited either outside of Mosul or outside of the country," says Haji Khalid proudly as he is  preparing to take his first sip of tea.

"They were not from my neighbourhood, many of them were foreigners, I think from Central Asia," he says trying to assure the Iraqi anti-terror force that ISIS had no roots in Al-Zuhur, one of the more affluent neighborhoods by the Tigris River in Mosul.

The Iraqi army has gained tentative control of nearly two dozen districts in the eastern outskirts of the city, but sporadic sniper attacks and grenade explosions which virtually  could hit anywhere, appear to suggest that the house to house chasing is likely to continue for a while.

"As you see," says an anti-terror commander while pointing at the tea pot in a house which the army just stormed, allegedly an ISIS hideout. "It's still warm. This means that they must have left in a hurry," the relatively clam commander says.

Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, was also one of the greatest bastions of Sunni insurgency even before ISIS came to power. Many of its residents have shown little trust in the central government in Baghdad which they have accused of favoring the Shiite areas in Iraq at the expense of Sunni provinces like Mosul.

Many also fear new rounds of disputes with the central government as Sunni leaders have declared that they will support a semi-independent region in Mosul for their Sunni countrymen.

Probably this is the reason why Haji Khalid, like many of his neighbors, raised a white flag at his door, implying in advance that he would be impartial in the war between the mainly Shiite army and the heartless ISIS Sunnis.

"The Daesh killed the terminally ill father of a friend of mine since he was unable to evacuate the house," the imam says.

"It's horrible things, horrible."