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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--The president of Mosul University has high hopes that his institution will once again be one of the top schools in the country after its main campus was retaken from ISIS militants on Sunday, though he acknowledged that they face a challenge to rebuild a sense of security for their students. More than 70 of the university’s teaching staff were killed in the more than two years of conflict and life under ISIS in Mosul.
The main concern is security, said Dr. Obay Saeed al-Dewachi, president of what was one of the largest education and research centres in the Middle East, in an interview with Rudaw English.
“There are more than fifty-six lecturers killed by Daesh, and now during the war, we lost more than twenty lecturers from Mosul University... from bombings their houses,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS.
Mosul University has continued operating outside of the city, running courses in Duhok and Kirkuk since ISIS overran the city in mid-2014. Dewachi said that it is too early to discuss reopening its main Mosul campus.
Iraqi security forces, backed by the global coalition, launched the largest military operation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to reclaim the city from ISIS militants on October 17.
“The two sides are near to each other,” Dewachi said commenting on the street-to-street fighting between the advancing Iraqi forces and ISIS, “so who is doing that, sometimes it is difficult [to tell].”
Even after the defeat of ISIS, he added that security will remain a concern, and it will take some time for students from around the country to feel confident in their safety if they choose to study in Mosul.
“It is very difficult to secure the security for them in these circumstances,” he said.
For now, he said, smiling, they are planning, together with the Iraqi minister for higher education, to make the university the best in the country.
“He promised to start to work with us to rebuild the Mosul University,” Dewachi said in reference to the minister for higher education, “and to make it the first university even here in Iraq.”
Their task to rebuild the university is an enormous one. ISIS used the campus as a headquarters, leading the US-led coalition to bomb the site in March 2016. A year earlier, ISIS had set fire to the main library, which contained many rare books, manuscripts, and maps.
ISIS was also reportedly using the university’s laboratories to produce weapons. Dewachi, however, said that the institution’s facilities may not have had adequate material to produce weapons, especially chemical weapons. He also noted that some of the buildings which were liberated by Iraqi forces in the fight for the university are part of a scientific centre that belonged to Baghdad, not the university.
“We have more than twenty laboratories for the chemical department,” Dewachi said when asked about the claims by the Iraqi army that ISIS used the university's lab to produce weapons. “But as you ask me, they are able to do something like that, I have no idea, because most of these materials are for students, for technical things, for teaching things. Not for industrial things.”
He did not however rule out the possibility that ISIS was able to produce weapons using the university’s facilities, explaining that he as the president does not have the authority to make contact with military commanders to receive updates about the operation on the campus.
“But probably, everything could happen. But I have no idea if these kind of weapons have been found in Mosul university.”
When ISIS first took over Mosul in mid-2014, they seized nuclear materials that were being used for scientific research at the university.
A senior Iraqi commander told Rudaw on Sunday that ISIS militants were using the campus as a command and control centre, while using its labs to make weapons.
“Their morale has collapsed, as they lost all of these districts and they lost the university,” Lt. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi from Iraq’s Golden Brigade told Rudaw inside the now-liberated Mosul University. “It was believed that the university was the main centre because there were workshops and laboratories to make weapons, explosives, and drones.”
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