Mosul Eye is a primary-source record of Mosul, written from inside it. The first dispatch was published at 9:30 am on 17 June 2014, the day the city fell to the so-called Islamic State. The project has continued, in different forms, every year since — through occupation, through liberation, and through the long work of recovery.
Origin
Mosul Eye began as a single anonymous account, kept by a Mosuli historian who chose to write from inside the city rather than leave it. The first three years of the archive — 2014 to 2017 — were written under the occupation of the so-called Islamic State. The author’s identity was not disclosed publicly until after the city was liberated in July 2017.
That historian is Omar Mohammed. He has continued to lead the project, and the archive has grown to include nearly three hundred published dispatches, an Oral History Centre, the Mosul Eye House (a cultural and documentation centre in Old Mosul), and ongoing programmes for library restoration, urban greening, and heritage recovery.
What this archive is
Mosul Eye is not a news outlet. It is a record. Its dispatches document Mosul as it has been lived — the occupation, the battle, the aftermath, the slow returnings — from a perspective the international press could not always reach: the perspective of those who stayed.
The archive serves several audiences. It is read by Mosulis as a public account of their own recent history. It is read by researchers and journalists as primary source material. And it is read by general readers across the world who want to understand what happened to Mosul, and what is happening still.
For an account of how dispatches are sourced and verified, see the Methodology page. For the structure of the archive itself — organised by year, by beat, and by historical anchor — see The Archive.
The book
The first three years of the archive have been drawn together into a forthcoming book: Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, with a foreword by Pope Francis. Forthcoming from Skyhorse Publishing on 21 July 2026. More on the book →
Independent. Reader-supported.
Mosul Eye accepts no advertising and no government funding. It is supported entirely by readers. Donations fund preservation of the archive itself, the Mosul Eye House, oral history fieldwork, and new reporting from inside Iraq. If you read this work and want it to continue, please support the archive.
Get in touch
For press and academic enquiries, oral history submissions, or access to source materials for research, please write to contact@mosul-eye.org.
You can also subscribe to the dispatch via the form on the home page. The newsletter goes out when there is something worth saying. No tracking, no algorithm.