Last Sunday I was in Mosul to write a report about people’s fear of ISIS sleeper cells in the liberated eastern part of the city. It was early in the morning and the city was just waking up. There was no gunfire or bombing except for the distant sound of coalition jets far in the sky and beyond the clouds.
After passing through multiple checkpoints manned by exhausted Iraqi soldiers I reached a part of town called al-Zuhur. I remembered right away that I had been in this neighborhood three months earlier when Iraqi troops were fighting ISIS house to house.
Not many people were out yet, so I went to a restaurant near a public square to find people to talk to. Unlike the rest of the city, the restaurant was packed. Civilians and soldiers alike had come for breakfast which was the city’s famous pacha. Sheep brain, intestines and legs.
A pot big enough for two fully grown men to crouch inside was on the cooker and people had lined up holding their bowls full of shredded bread. They would hand it to the cook and he would fill it with pacha and gravy plus two slices of lemon and garlic.
It was a very busy restaurant. There were more servers than I could count and more customers than they could tend to. Every few seconds a group of people would come in and line up for the giant pot.
The two-story restaurant had inside and outside seating and steam from the giant pot which rose to the ceiling with the noise and bustle of the place made it all look like a busy factory. Almost half of the customers were members of the Iraqi Special Forces.
Next to the man with the giant pot was the tea section. When people finished their pacha which they ate with their hands without forks or spoons, they washed their hands with soap and headed straight for the tea. Two young men constantly poured tea for the customers and they worked fast like machines to keep up with those who wanted to wash down the greasy pacha with hot tea.
As I stood there observing this hustle and bustle I saw a man who wasn’t left alone for a second. Always one, two or three men would come up to him and either ask him something or he would tell them something and they would walk away.
He was a man of about 50 years of age or a little younger, perhaps. He was wearing a leather jacket, a jumper underneath and had neatly shaved and cropped the edges of his black moustache. He was like the leader of a group surrounded by close aides. I asked and was told he was the owner of the restaurant.
In a moment when there was no one bothering him I went up to him and struck up a conversation. His name was Haji Nasir. To a local ear his name sounds like an old man. But he was young and full of life. The building was his grandfather’s old house and he had turned into a successful and famous restaurant.
Haji Nasir was a business man in the true sense. He had managed to keep his restaurant open during all the turmoil and fighting Mosul had endured in the past decade. But, he said, he always had a hard time with extremist militants. In 2005 the al-Qaeda forced him to change the name of the place and imposed on him the Islamic tax. During ISIS he was forced again to change the name of the place and now that Iraqi troops were in charge he had changed the name again for the third time.
Haji Nasir had a lot to say about the ISIS militants who ruled his city for two years. They used to come to his restaurant to eat whenever they liked. Sometimes they paid and other times they didn’t even bother to say thank you. He had served militants from across the world, Arabs, North Africans, Europeans, from the Gulf region and Caucasia, and he didn’t have anything for the Moroccan militants except resentment and anger. “The Moroccans were the worst,” he said, with a sniffle as if he had just recovered from a cold. “They would come here and treat you like you were nothing, not a human. They were insulting, abusive and arrogant.”
He closed his restaurant only for a few days during heavy clashes between ISIS and Iraqi troops in November. Haji Nasir said most of the militants who imposed such strict sharia law on his city and its people, didn’t even pray themselves. They would come into the restaurant, mostly for lunch, and order all the staff including customers to line up for prayers during pray time, said Haji Nasir, but they wouldn’t do that themselves. “We are busy and in the middle of jihad,” they would say. So they were excused from fulfilling their daily prayers. They would continue to eat while the rest prayed.
Haji Nasir had fled when ISIS came to Mosul in 2014 and spent a few days in Hassan Sham village, but had returned because the militants would seize any property or business whose owners had run away. He kept the restaurant running and paid ISIS cash amounts in Islamic zakat.
I was in Mosul that morning about people’s unease and fear of ISIS sleeper cells inside the city who had simply laid down their guns and shaved their beards, but bided their time to strike again.
Their fear and uncertainty were justified because yesterday afternoon, only five days after my conversation with Haji Nasir, an ISIS suicide bomber walked into his restaurant and killed him.
