WEBDESK - NAYADAUR
For years, Omar Mohammed lived a double life. To the world, he was a historian and blogger known by the pseudonym “Mosul Eye.” Inside the ISIS-occupied Iraqi city, he was quietly documenting an extremist takeover while trying to preserve evidence of what was happening around him.
His remarkable story is now being revisited through his new book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, which chronicles his clandestine work during the occupation and the battle that eventually liberated Mosul.
Mohammed’s work went far beyond reporting. He gathered information through daily conversations and observations, publishing accounts of life under ISIS while attempting to tell the story of a city under siege.
By 2016, he had escaped Mosul and was living in Paris, but he continued following the war remotely. Using satellite imagery, contacts with civilians inside the city and information gathered from his sources, he published coordinates through his Twitter account.
That information eventually became directly useful to military and rescue operations.
Mohammed had previously rejected requests to share his intelligence with security services, preferring to remain an independent historian and writer. But when the U.S.-led coalition began its campaign to retake Mosul, he began providing information to U.S. Central Command and Iraqi security forces.
His knowledge of the city’s streets allowed him to direct rescuers through routes that could otherwise have been difficult to identify.
Among those helped was his friend, identified in the book only as Nadeem, an archaeologist who had participated in clandestine meetings focused on Mosul’s archaeological heritage. Nadeem, his family and their neighbors were eventually rescued from a building where they had been trapped. Mohammed could not reveal his identity to them at the time because doing so could have endangered his family and friends still inside Mosul.
The book also examines how ISIS consolidated control over Mosul. Its takeover was not simply a military conquest; the group used existing institutions and bureaucratic structures to establish authority. Former Iraqi military and intelligence personnel helped create a hierarchical system, while ISIS exploited public grievances through administrative offices that appeared to offer justice.
The occupation devastated the city’s social fabric. Christians were expelled after refusing ISIS demands, while Yazidis and other minorities suffered massacres and persecution. The subsequent U.S.-led campaign to remove ISIS in 2016-17 caused further destruction, with more than a million civilians caught inside the city during the battle.
Today, Mosul is rebuilding. Landmarks including the Al Nuri Mosque and its leaning Al Hadba minaret and the Tahera Church have been restored with assistance from the UAE, while markets and daily life are returning. Yet Mohammed warns that reconstruction alone cannot fully heal the city’s wounds.
He fears that the diversity that once defined Mosul may never fully return, particularly after the departure of its Yazidi and Christian communities. His hope is that the city will eventually confront the difficult questions surrounding its past rather than allowing unanswered history to shape its future.
The extraordinary legacy of Mosul Eye is therefore not simply that one blogger documented ISIS. It is that a historian’s secret archive became a tool for survival—and helped turn information into a lifeline.