Mosul

Across the Tigris from the ruins of Nineveh—capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that ruled the ancient world from 911 to 609 BCE—Mosul inherited both the geography and the imperial pattern. The city controls the upper Tigris at the point where Mesopotamian plains meet Kurdish mountains, a position that made Nineveh the capital of history's first superpower and made Mosul a prize for every subsequent empire: Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Mongol, Ottoman.

Mosul emerged as a major city under the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century, becoming a center for textile production—the English word 'muslin' derives from the city's name. The fabric was so fine and the trade so lucrative that Mosul's weavers became famous across the medieval world. Under Ottoman rule (1534–1918), the city served as a provincial capital controlling trade routes between Baghdad, Aleppo, and Anatolia. Oil was discovered in the Mosul vilayet in the early twentieth century, and the 1926 League of Nations decision to award the territory to Iraq rather than Turkey shaped the region's politics permanently.

ISIS captured Mosul on 10 June 2014 with approximately 1,500 fighters routing 30,000 Iraqi soldiers—one of the most stunning military collapses in modern history. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, whose famous leaning minaret (the al-Hadba, dating to 1172) was subsequently destroyed by ISIS during the recapture battle. The Battle of Mosul (2016–2017) to retake the city lasted nine months and killed an estimated 9,000–11,000 civilians. The Old City on the western bank was reduced to rubble—UNESCO estimated 65% of buildings in the historic core were heavily damaged or destroyed.

Mosul's pre-war population of 1.8 million has partially recovered, with an estimated 1.5 million residents. Reconstruction costs exceed $50 billion by some estimates, with much of the Old City still in ruins. The University of Mosul—Iraq's second-largest university, founded in 1967—lost its central library (containing thousands of manuscripts, some dating to the Ottoman period) to ISIS arson and looting. The city represents Iraq's deepest wound from the ISIS era: a major metropolitan center where a millennium of architectural heritage was destroyed in three years, and where reconstruction depends on a central government whose resources are stretched across a country still managing sectarian fragmentation.