Two years since the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was retaken from the Islamic State group (ISIS), the historic Old City on the western banks of the Tigris River still lies in ruins.

West Mosul saw the brunt of the fighting between ISIS militants and Iraqi security forces, supported by international coalition airstrikes. The battle to retake the city raged from October 2016 to July 2017. 

Most of its buildings were damaged or completely destroyed.

Ikhlas Younis, a mother of nine, had no option but to return to her gutted home. 

Speaking to Rudaw on July 1 in the old Jewish quarter, she pleads for help from the Iraqi government and the international community to restore basic public services.

“We are calling on philanthropists, the merciful to take care of us,” Younis said. “The dead bodies are still under the rubble of my house.”

Mohammed Abdulrahman, who as lived in the Old City for 40 years, started repair work on his house without any assistance.

“This is the house where my father and grandfather had lived. Daesh destroyed it,” Abdulrahman told Rudaw, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS. 

“We had no other place to go but to return to it. After I returned, I started to repair my house bit by bit.”

“Nobody reached out to us, neither the government nor the organizations.”

Before ISIS seized the city in June 2014, the population of Mosul was around two million. Today it is barely half this number. Around 400,000 people have chosen not to return, citing the lack of services and security.

A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) project has been launched to restore and rebuild private houses in the historic Old City.  

The project falls under the Funding Facility for Stabilization (FFS) and is focused on the restoration of 12,000 to 15,000 damaged houses, located across 29 neighborhoods in the Old City area.

Photos by Mahdi Faraj