Finalist: Staff of Associated Press

By Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Maggie Michael

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts.

He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Islamic State group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they cut off his head for blasphemy.

Sameh al-Azzawi, the 35-year-old medical assistant examining him, was sick of seeing Mosul’s youth butchered for the slightest reason. The man was a newlywed. His family was waiting outside; it was one of the occasional times when the fanatics allowed the return of someone killed by the group. So al-Azzawi violated the rules: He picked out some thick thread and quickly sewed the man’s head back on, then zipped him up in the body bag. He could sew a head back on a body in four minutes.

The family quietly thanked him.

The morgue in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was where atrocity met bureaucracy, the processing point for the machine of butchery that the Islamic State group created across its territory in Iraq and Syria. Every day, the doctors and staff witnessed the worst of what the militants were capable of inflicting on a human being, constantly fearing they could be next.

Yet the morgue men of Mosul found ways large and small to defy their captors by honoring the dead as best they could.

“Our profession as doctors is all about humanity,” said the morgue’s senior examiner, Modhar al-Omari. “They were doing the exact opposite.”

The staff sometimes faced up to 60 or even 100 corpses a day. As pickup trucks laden with bodies did three-point turns to back through the morgue’s gates, hands, legs or heads fell off onto the ground.

Some were the mangled bodies of civilians and IS fighters killed in bombardment by the U.S-led coalition or fighting with Iraqi troops. Others bore the marks of IS’ brutal enforcement of its radical version of Islamic law. A broken skull on a man with internal bleeding could mean he was thrown from a rooftop, the punishment for those suspected of being gay. A woman with a split skull from a blunt force was likely stoned to death, the sentence for accused adulterers. Then there were punishments for spying or blasphemy: a gunshot wound through the head or decapitation.

Convinced its “caliphate” was here to stay, the Islamic State group was keen on keeping records like a government. As they put together death certificates, the examiners quietly documented IS atrocities . They surreptitiously put an Arabic letter alif to mark a member of the group, and an M, the first letter in the Arabic word for “executed,” for the group’s victims.

One Excel sheet shows more than 1,200 people shot in the head, a likely sign of IS “executions,” between June 2014 when IS took over Mosul and January 2017, when Iraqi forces were fighting to take the city back — an average of 11 a week. The list has 12 women marked as “stoned to death.” It also lists 95 people who were beheaded and 50 men and boys who died from a “fall from a height,” likely hurled from rooftops.

The staff operated under close scrutiny by IS officials and threat of punishment if they broke the rules or tried to leave. Among those rules: The bodies of those “executed under religious law” could not be returned to their families, except in cases where an IS commander allowed it. Instead, they were dumped in mass graves. Thousands more went directly into mass graves without ever coming to the morgue ad IS brought at least 1,000 bodies to the morgue that they did not allow the staff to examine, so they have no idea who they were and did not record them.

Al-Azzawi managed to sew the heads back on about 10 bodies, he estimates. It had to be quick. He did it after midnight in the washing area, which IS fighters tended to stay out of because it was the worst smelling part of the morgue.

He stopped when one militant saw a body with the head restored. “We cut it and you put it back?” the fighter shouted. He warned that any examiner caught doing it would himself be beheaded.

“HE’S STILL ALIVE!”

A pickup truck dumped nearly a dozen bodies onto the pavement of the morgue courtyard, the latest delivery. “Get up!” an IS fighter screamed at the staff, summoning them to begin their daily task of sorting through the dead.

As the medical assistants went to work, one of them stopped short in surprise: Among the bodies, a young man in a soccer jersey and training pants who had been thrown off a rooftop was breathing.

“He’s still alive!” the assistant shouted instinctively.

He hardly had time to realize his mistake. The IS fighter opened fire with his automatic rifle, spraying the bodies. Bullets thumped into the already dead and finished off the young man.

“It’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure,” said Raid Jassim, the chief medical assistant. “I always expected them to come at any moment and kill or behead us.”

In 2005, Jassim was overjoyed to get a government posting at Mosul’s Forensic Department, the morgue. The pay was several times more than what he’d earn in a government hospital. He was a graduate of a medical institute, a two-year diploma after high school, and had gone on to serve as an army nurse. At the morgue, he carried out examinations of bodies under supervision of doctors like al-Omari.

But no training prepared him for what he saw under the killers ruling his city.

A few months after IS took over, a militant brought in the body of a Yazidi woman, one of thousands from the religious minority group taken as sex slaves. She had hanged herself after being repeatedly gang-raped.

Jassim, 48, watched in horror and disgust as the militant spoke to the body. “Why did you kill yourself? I told you I am not selling you to the commander. I told you I was going to marry you,” the fighter pleaded.

One evening, fighters drove up with two men, alive, in the trunk of their car. They pulled them into the morgue courtyard and — in front of staffers too terrified to say a word — they shot one in the head and decapitated the other.

“This is a message to anyone who betrays the Caliphate,” one fighter yelled. The examiners suspected the two were IS members who had turned against the group. But they didn’t know why the fighters brought them to the morgue to kill. Was it a message for the staff somehow?

“In these occasions, we don’t open our mouths. We just stay silent,” Jassim said.

The morgue was located in the al-Shifaa medical complex, a large compound in the western half of Mosul that included the city’s main hospital, Jomhouriya, and other facilities. It was the primary medical facility for the militants, so fighters were brought from elsewhere in Iraq and even Syria for treatment. The office of the IS health minister was located there. That meant the staff was under the militants’ eyes all the time.

Jassim is a chain smoker and smoking was a crime. He hid his pack under his belt, covering up the smell with a spray of musk. Still, he was caught and punished with 30 lashes.

Another time he was severely beaten with a rifle butt in the office of IS’s deputy health minister, where he was taken after he refused a fighter’s demand that he forge a death certificate. Jassim’s two young sons, outside the office, heard their father’s screams.

But in a few cases, he and other staffers smuggled the dead to their families before they vanished into mass graves. They did it in secret, at night, cutting electricity to shut off the morgue’s security cameras as they hustled the bodies into their cars.

In one case, Jassim inspected the body of a woman who had been killed for allegedly feeding information to the Iraqi military.

In February 2016, she had posted on her Facebook page, “Snow is falling.” That seemed suspiciously like code to the Islamic State group, and she was arrested. The judge allowed her husband and children to meet with her for an hour before she was taken out to a public square and shot to death.

After that excruciating torment, the family should at least to be able to bury her, Jassim thought.

He met the businessmen at night in a parking garage, switching off the headlights of their cars off for fear of airstrikes. “You brought her?” the businessman asked. “Yes,” Jassim replied. The man broke into tears and hugged him in gratitude. Jassim then opened his car’s trunk so they could pull out his wife’s corpse.

BURYING THE TRAUMA

Al-Azzawi recounts how tragedy after tragedy broke him down.

One day, he was going through the latest body bags when he saw a name he recognized pinned to a corpse. It was his cousin. The face was unrecognizable; he had been shot in the head for allegedly spying.

“I couldn’t believe it, I was reading the piece of paper over and over,” he said.

Months later, al-Azzawi tried to escape Mosul with a smuggler’s help. He and dozen others hid under boxes of potato chips in a truck but were caught near the Syrian border. He spent 10 days in detention, released only after he signed a pledge never to flee again on pain of death.

After that, “anything they ask for I do without complaint.”

One day after seeing 60 bodies, he went home and smashed his TV set.

Iraqi troops liberated western Mosul in the summer of 2017, and much of the medical complex where the morgue is located was bombed into ruins during the fighting that drove out the militants.

A stench now pervades the morgue from bodies that were in the refrigerators and are now buried in the rubble. The metal desks in the morgue offices have IS stickers on the drawers. Written on a wall is one of the slogans of the group, “Baqiya” — Arabic for “We will remain.” Next to it, someone has scrawled an insult, “Son of dog.”

Freed, the morgue men struggle with what they endured. Jassim can’t sleep without popping multiple valiums. His 13-year-old son — fearing for his father — won’t sleep apart from him. Some staffers have disappeared since liberation, simply not showing back up to work.

Al-Omari, the chief examiner, has been numbed by the helplessness he felt in the face of the fanatics’ dictates and butchery.

The 43-year-old veteran doctor and surgeon was well known among his staff for his calm. He was used to wearing suits, but under IS he was forced to wear the “Islamic” garb of shortened pants and a long beard that the group said was the style of the Prophet Muhammad.

The atrocities his staff was forced to contend with seemed endless: 16 boys under the age of 14 shot in the head. Six girls shot in the head. His job was to sign off on the cause of death for victims’ brutalized corpses. As a forensics doctor, he also had to investigate the “crimes” of the living — like signing medical examinations of whether women accused of adultery were virgins or not.

He got some revenge by passing on information. He secretly told the government in Baghdad when several senior commanders were killed in airstrikes.

But he says he has never cried for the dead.

“You can’t talk or explain. You just keep it inside,” he says. “If I cried, I’d cry every day for every single body.”

Michael reported from Cairo.

By Lori Hinnant and Maggie Michael

The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear.

He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul.

He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

He had spent nearly his entire life in this home, with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor.

“I am leaving,” he said. “Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He couldn’t endanger her by telling her anything more. In truth, since the IS had invaded his city, he’d lived a life about which she was totally unaware.

He felt her eyes on the back of his neck, and headed to the waiting Chevrolet. He didn’t look back.

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger . As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

He knew that if he was caught he too would be killed.

“I am writing this for the history, because I know this will end. People will return, life will go back to normal,” is how he explained the blog that was his conduit to the citizens of Mosul and the world beyond. “After many years, there will be people who will study what happened. The city deserves to have something written to defend the city and tell the truth, because they say that when the war begins, the first victim is the truth.”

He called himself Mosul Eye . He made a promise to himself in those first few days: Trust no one, document everything.

Neither family, friends nor the Islamic State group could identify him. His readership grew by the thousands every month.

And now, he was running for his life.

But it would mean passing through one Islamic State checkpoint after another, on the odds that the extremists wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t find the hard drive that contained evidence of IS atrocities, the names of its collaborators and fighters, and all the evidence that its bearer was the man they’d been trying to silence since they first swept in.

The weight of months and years of anonymity were crushing him.

He missed his name.

___

From the beginning, Mosul Eye wrote simultaneously as a witness and a historian. Born in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war in 1986, he had come of age during a second war, when Saddam Hussein fell and the Americans took over. At 17, he remembers going to a meeting of extremists at the mosque and hearing them talk about fighting the crusaders. “I should be honest, I didn’t understand.”

As for the Americans, whose language he already spoke haltingly, he couldn’t fathom why they would come all the way from the United States to Mosul. He thought studying history would give him the answers.

The men in black came from the north, cutting across his neighborhood in brand new trucks, the best all-terrain Toyotas money could buy. He had seen jihadis before in Mosul and at first figured these men would fade away like the rest. But in the midst of pitched fighting, the extremists found the time to run down about 70 assassination targets and kill them all, hanging enormous banners announcing their arrival in June 2014.

By then a newly minted teacher, the historian attended a staff meeting at Mosul University, where the conquerors explained the Islamic State education system, how all classes would be based upon the strictest interpretation of the Quran. To a man who had been accused of secularism during his master’s thesis defense just the year before, it felt like the end of his career.

In those first few days, he wrote observations about IS, also known by the acronym ISIS, on his personal Facebook page — until a friend warned that he risked being killed. With the smell of battle still in the air, he wandered the streets, puzzling over its transformation into a city at war. He returned to find his family weeping. The smell of smoke and gunfire permeated the home.

On June 18, 2014, a week after the city fell, Mosul Eye was born.

“My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my personal opinion to myself,” he wrote. “I will only communicate the facts I see.”

By day, he chatted with Islamic State fighters and vendors, and observed. Always observed. By night, he wrote in his native Arabic and fluent English on a WordPress blog and later on Facebook and Twitter.

The city turned dark, and Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about the Islamic State fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself. The things IS wanted kept secret went to the heart of its brutal rule.

“They were organized as a killing machine. They are thirsty (for) blood and money and women.”

He attended Friday sermons with feigned enthusiasm. He collected and posted propaganda leaflets, including one on July 27, 2014, that claimed the Islamic State leader was a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. Back home, writing on his blog in his other, secret identity, he decried the leaflet as a blatant attempt “to distort history” to justify the fanatics’ actions.

He drank glass after glass of tea at the hospital, talking to people who worked there. Much of the information he collected went up online. Other details he kept in his computer, for fear they would give away his identity. Someday, he told himself, he would write Mosul’s history using these documents.

The most sensitive information initially came from two old friends: one a doctor and the other a high school dropout who embraced the Islamic State’s extreme interpretation of religion. He was a taxi driver who like many others in Mosul had been detained by a Shiite militia in 2008 and still burned with resentment. He swiftly joined an intelligence unit in Mosul, becoming “one of the monsters of ISIS” — and couldn’t resist bragging about his insider knowledge.

Once he corroborated the details and masked the sources, Mosul Eye put it out for the world to see. He sometimes included photos of the fighters and commanders, complete with biographies pieced together over days of surreptitious gathering of bits and pieces of information during the course of his normal life — that of an out-of-work scholar living at home with his family.

“I used the two characters, the two personalities to serve each other,” he said. He would chat up market vendors and bored checkpoint guards for new leads.

He took on other identities as well on Facebook. Although the names were clearly fake, the characters started to take on a life of their own. One was named Mouris Milton whom he came to believe was an even better version of himself — funny, knowledgeable. Another was Ibn al-Athir al-Mawsilli, a coldly logical historian.

International media picked up on Mosul Eye from the first days, starting with an online question-and-answer with a German newspaper. The anonymous writer gave periodic written interviews in English over the years. Sometimes, journalists quoted his blog and called it an interview. In October 2016, he spoke by phone with the New Yorker for a profile but still kept his identity masked.

Intelligence agencies made contact as well and he rebuffed them each time.

“I am not a spy or a journalist,” he would say. “I tell them this: If you want the information, it’s published and it’s public for free. Take it.”

First the Islamic State group compiled lists of women accused of prostitution, he said, stoning or shooting around 500 in the initial months. Then it went after men accused of being gay, flinging them off tall buildings. Shiites, Christians and Yazidis fled from a city once proud of its multiple religions.

When the only Mosul residents left were fellow Sunnis, they too were not spared, according to the catalog of horrors that is Mosul Eye’s daily report. He detailed the deaths and whippings, for spying and apostasy, for failing to attend prayers, for overdue taxes. The blog attracted the attention of the fanatics, who posted death threats in the comments section.

___

Less than a year into their rule, in March 2015, he nearly cracked. IS beheaded a 14-year-old in front of a crowd; 12 people were arrested for selling and smoking cigarettes, and some of them flogged publicly. Seeing few alternatives, young men from Mosul were joining up by the dozens.

The sight of a fanatic severing the hand of a child accused of stealing unmoored him. The man told the boy that his hand was a gift of repentance to God before serenely slicing it away.

It was too much.

Mosul Eye was done. He defied the dress requirements, cut his hair short, shaved his beard and pulled on a bright red crewneck sweater. He persuaded his closest friend to join him.

“I decided to die.”

The sun shining, they drove to the banks of the Tigris blasting forbidden music from the car. They spread a scrap of rug over a stone outcropping and shared a carafe of tea. Mosul Eye lit a cigarette, heedless of a handful of other people picnicking nearby.

“I was so tired of worrying about myself, my family, my brothers. I am not alive to worry, but I am alive to live this life. I thought: I am done.”

He planned it as a sort of last supper, a final joyful day to end all days. He assumed he would be spotted, arrested, tortured. The tea was the best he had ever tasted.

Somehow, incredibly, his crimes went unnoticed.

He went home.

“At that moment I felt like I was given a new life.”

He grew out his hair and beard again, put the shortened trousers back on. And, for the remainder of his time in Mosul, smoked and listened to music in his room with the curtains drawn and the lights off. His computer screen and the tip of his cigarette glowed as he wrote in the dark.

The next month, he slipped up.

His friend the ex-taxi driver told him about an airstrike that had just killed multiple high-level Islamic State commanders, destroying a giant weapons cache. Elated, Mosul Eye dashed home to post it online. He hit “publish” and then, minutes later, realized his mistake. The information could have come from only one person. He trashed the post and spent a sleepless night.

“It’s like a death game and one mistake could finish your life.”

For a week, he went dark. Then he invited his friend to meet at a restaurant. They ate spicy chicken, an unemployed teacher and the gun-toting ex-taxi driver talking again about their city and their lives. His cover was not blown.

The historian went back online. Alongside the blog, he kept meticulous records — information too dangerous to share.

His computer hard drive filled with death, filed according to date, cause of death, perpetrator, neighborhood and ethnicity. Accompanying each spreadsheet entry was a separate file with observations from each day.

“IS is forcing abortions and tubal ligation surgeries on Yazidi women,” he wrote in unpublished notes from January 2015. A doctor told him there had been between 50 and 60 forced abortions and a dozen Yazidi girls younger than 15 died of injuries from repeated rapes.

April 19, 2015: “The forensics department received the bodies of 23 IS militants killed in Baiji. They had no shrapnel, no bullets, no explosives and the cause of death does not seem to be explosion. It is like nothing happened to the bodies. A medical source believes they were exposed to poison gas.”

July 7, 2015: “43 citizens were executed in different places, this time by gunfire, which is unusual because they were previously beheadings. A source inside IS said that 13 of those who were executed are fighters and they tried to flee.”

He noted a flurry of security on days when the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, seemed to be in town.

Many in Iraq, especially those who supported the Shiite-dominated leadership in Baghdad, blamed Mosul for its own fate. Mosul Eye freely acknowledged that some residents at first believed the new conquerors could only be an improvement over the heavy-handed government and the soldiers who fled with hardly a backward glance at the city they were supposed to defend.

But he also wrote publicly and privately of the suffering among citizens who refused to join the group. He was fighting on two fronts: “One against ISIS, and the other against the rumors. Trying to protect the face of Mosul, the soul of Mosul.”

He tested out different voices, implying one day that he was Christian, another that he was Muslim. Sometimes he indicated he was gone, other times that he was still in the city. “I couldn’t trust anyone,” he said.

In his mind, he left Mosul a thousand times, but always found reasons to stay: his mother, his nieces and nephews, his mission.

But finally, he had to go.

“I had to run away with the proof that will protect Mosul for years to come, and to at least be loyal to the people who were killed in the city.”

And he did not want to become another casualty of the monsters.

“I think I deserve life, deserve to be alive.”

A smuggler, persuaded by $1,000 and the assurances of a mutual acquaintance, agreed to get him out. He was leaving the next day. Mosul Eye had no time to reflect, no time to change his mind.

He returned home and began transferring the contents of his computer to the hard drive. He pulled out the orange notebook with the hand-drawn map of Mosul on the cover and the outlines of what he hoped would one day be his doctoral dissertation. Into the bag went “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,” an obscure American satirical novel from 1770 that he had ordered from Amazon via a new shop that was the only place in town to order from abroad online.

It was time to leave.

He wanted to make sure his mother would never have to watch the capture and killing of Mosul Eye.

On Dec. 15, 2015 he left Mosul, driving with the smuggler to the outskirts of Raqqa, a pickup point that alarmed him. From there he and other Iraqis and Syrians were picked up by a second set of smugglers and driven by convoy to Turkey.

They had no trouble crossing the border.

__

In Turkey, Mosul Eye kept at it: via WhatsApp and Viber, from Facebook messages and long conversations with friends and relatives who had contacts within IS. From hundreds of kilometers away, his life remained consumed by events in Mosul.

By mid-2016, deaths were piling up faster than he could document. The IS and airstrikes were taking a bloody toll on residents. His records grew haphazard, and he turned to Twitter to document the atrocities. In February 2017, he received asylum in Europe with the aid of an organization that learned his backstory. He continued to track the airstrikes and Islamic State killings

He mapped the airstrikes as they closed in on his family, pleading with his older brother to leave his home in West Mosul. Ahmed, 36, died days later when shrapnel from a mortar strike pierced his heart, leaving behind four young children.

It was only then that Mosul Eye revealed his secret to a younger brother — who was proud to learn the anonymous historian he had been reading for so long was his brother.

“People in Mosul had lost hope and confidence in politicians, in everything,” his brother said. Mosul Eye “managed to show that it’s possible to change the situation in the city and bring it back to life.”

As the Old City crumbled, Mosul Eye sent coordinates and phone numbers for homes filled with civilians to a BBC journalist who was covering the battle, trying to get the attention of someone in the coalition command. He believes he saved lives.

Then, with his beloved Old City destroyed, Mosul Eye launched a fundraiser to rebuild the city’s libraries because the extremists had burned all the books. None of his volunteers knew his identity.

An activist who helped co-found a “Women of Mosul” Facebook group with Mosul Eye describes him as a “spiritual leader” for the city’s secular-minded.

“He was telling us about the day-to-day events under ISIS and we were following closely with excitement as if we were watching a movie. Sometimes he went through hard times and we used to encourage him. He won the people’s trust and we became very curious to know his real personality,” said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she believed she was still in danger.

From a distance, finally writing his dissertation on 19th century Mosul history in the safety of a European city, he continued to write as Mosul Eye and organize cultural events and fundraisers from afar — even after Mosul was liberated.

The double life consumed him, sapped energy he’d rather use for the doctoral dissertation and for helping Mosul rebuild. And it hurt when someone asked the young Iraqi why he didn’t do more to help his people. He desperately wanted his mother to know all that he had done.

He felt barely real, with so many people knowing him by false identities: 293,000 followers on Facebook, 37,000 on WordPress and 23,400 on Twitter.

In hours of face-to-face conversations with The Associated Press over the course of two months, he agonized over when and how to end the anonymity that plagued him. He did not want to be a virtual character anymore.

On Nov. 15, 2017, Mosul Eye made his decision.

“I can’t be anonymous anymore. This is to say that I defeated ISIS. You can see me now, and you can know me now.”

He is 31 years old.

His name is Omar Mohammed.

“I am a scholar.”

By Susannah George

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — There was a smell of death in Mosul’s Old City when Ayman Hashem came back this week to see what happened to his home. His neighborhood was unrecognizable.

“All that’s left is rubble and the bodies of families trapped underneath,” the 23-year-old said. He flipped through photos on his phone, showing picture after picture of wreckage. His own house was “cut in half,” he said. He had to cover his nose with his tee-shirt because of the smell of buried, rotting bodies.

Iraq’s U.S.-backed forces wrested Mosul from the Islamic State group at the cost of enormous destruction. The nearly 9-month fight culminated with a crescendo of devastation — the blasting of the historic Old City to root out the deeply dug-in militants.

Nearly a third of the Old City — more than 5,000 buildings — was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery. Across the city, 10,000 buildings were damaged over the course of the war, the large majority in western Mosul, the scene of the most intense artillery, airstrikes and fighting during the past five months. The survey only covers damage visible in satellite photos, meaning the real number is likely higher.

The population, once numbering 3 million, is battered and exhausted, with hundreds of thousands displaced. Without a swift campaign to rebuild Mosul, aid and rights groups warn the current humanitarian crisis will balloon and resentment will likely give way to extremism, undermining the victory.

“If the western half is ignored it will produce a social disaster and this social disaster will create bigger destruction if it’s not addressed,” said Khatab Mohammed al-Najjar, a resident of eastern Mosul who watched the Old City burn from across the Tigris River during the operation.

“West Mosul produced Daesh, and it is very possible it may produce a new Daesh,” he said, referring to west Mosul’s historically more religious and traditional residents. He used the Arabic acronym for IS.

When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory in Mosul Monday, he pledged reconstruction would begin soon. But his government still struggles to finance day-to-day workings of the state amid low oil prices.

Thousands of Mosul families have been left without a home. Schools have been leveled, utility grids wrecked, highways pounded into broken dirt roads.

All five of the city’s bridges spanning the Tigris River have been damaged. The main hospital complex where a battle raged for more than a month is a burned out shell. Mosul’s airport looks like a derelict parking lot, booby-trapped with explosives by fleeing IS fighters.

In eastern Mosul, the destruction was less intense. More than 160,000 of the 176,000 people who fled the east have returned, according to the U.N. Residents have begun rebuilding homes, shops have reopened, and demining is underway.

But west of the Tigris, neighborhoods have been rendered into ghost towns. There, coalition strikes killed some 5,805 civilians between Feb. 19 and June 19, according to Airwars, a London-based monitoring group tracking civilian deaths resulting from coalition actions.

Fewer than a tenth of the more than 730,000 people who fled western Mosul have filtered back.

Saif Mohammed recently re-opened his sandwich shop on a main avenue in the west, repairing war damage with the help of a $5,000 loan from relatives. On the same street, only two or three other shops are open. The other storefronts are bombed out and burned, the corrugated Iron doors warped by explosions.

His shop is a bet that residents will return. “But what people really need is government help,” he said. “If the government doesn’t give money, there won’t be any rebuilding.”

Hiyam Mohammed hid in her home with her family on the edge of the Old City throughout the fight. They could see the cemetery from their house.

“Some days the funerals lasted from dawn into the night. There were so many bodies piled up, it looked like a hill,” she said. “I thought I was going crazy seeing this. They didn’t even have time to wash the dead.”

She said the only way to justice is if the government and coalition pay compensation to those who lost relatives or property.

“The government brought Daesh to us,” she said, referring to sectarian rule that fueled Sunni extremism and corruption that weakened the country’s security forces. “This mess is God’s revenge for that.”

But some in the security forces have resentments of their own, blaming Mosul residents for supporting IS.

“The people here have always had a rebellious nature, so they should take some responsibility for what has happened,” said Maj. Imad Hassan, a federal police officer from Baghdad.

During the campaign, his unit fought to capture a stretch of the corniche running along the Tigris, hammering it with artillery for weeks to clear out IS resistance. The former municipal center was shredded, rows of buildings blackened, palm trees lining the boulevard burned.

“I hope this destruction teaches them their lesson,” he said.

Iraqi and coalition officials say the devastation was the result of the Islamic State group’s tenacious grip. IS transformed the city into a fortress. Its fighters used hospitals and schools as military bases, moved civilians from the rural outskirts into central neighborhoods to use as shields from airstrikes and rigged hundreds of houses and roads with explosives.

Nearly 10 years ago, Maj. Maher Aziz Khalaf fought IS’ predecessor, al-Qaida, in Mosul alongside U.S. forces. But when he rolled into western Mosul with the first wave of Iraqi special forces troops in early February he said he immediately realized this battle would alter the city in a way previous fights hadn’t.

“In 2008 it was different. We would just identify which houses the terrorists were living in, come in at night and arrest them,” he said. “We were fighting gangs, not an entire city.”

A coalition spokesman, Col. Joe Scrocca, said the forces had to balance between protecting non-combatants and infrastructure on one hand and moving quickly on the other. Another factor, he said, was that the longer it took to free the city, the more danger civilians were in, whether from lack of food or IS retaliation.

Hesitant to risk casualties along their own troops, Iraqi military commanders relied on airpower and artillery to clear neighborhoods where a handful of IS fighters armed with light weapons and civilians as human shields repeatedly stalled entire units of Iraq’s military.

As the fight moved to the Old City, rights groups and the U.N. warned the coalition and Iraqi forces against using large munitions. Still, the U.S.-led coalition repeatedly approved the use of 500- and 2,000-pound bombs inside the densely populated district.

As waves of civilians fled the Old City, more than a dozen individuals told the AP they knew of multiple families killed under their homes by what they believed to be airstrikes.

“The buildings can be rebuilt, but the human lives lost cannot,” said Iraqi special forces Lt. Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi from a base on the edge of Old City on Tuesday.

“But the buildings in the Old City were all very old anyway,” he said. “Now we can demolish them and build apartment buildings.”

Associated Press writers Salar Salim, Felipe Dana, Bram Janssen and Balint Szlanko in Mosul, Iraq, and Lee Keath in Cairo contributed to this report.

By Bram Janssen and Lee Keath

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — The three women tensed as their taxi approached the checkpoint manned by Islamic State group fighters. Everyone in Mosul dreaded checkpoints; you could never predict what these gunmen might do in their fanatic drive to crush the slightest hint of “sin.” One of them peered at the girl in the back seat, Ferah.

The 14-year-old wore the required veil over her face, but she had forgotten to lower the flap that also hid her eyes. A fighter barked at her to close it. But Ferah was not wearing her gloves, which were also required. If she fixed her veil, they would see her bare hands, and things would only get worse.

She shrank in her seat, trying to disappear.

The gunmen exploded, screaming that they would take Ferah, her mom and her sister to the Hisba, the feared religious police who punished violators of IS’s orders. They pulled the driver out and questioned him. How do you know these women?

Ferah felt the gunmen looming outside her window — frightening, huge and muscular, with beards down to their chests. Her mother went pale. A simple drive to a friend’s house was spiraling into disaster.

And just as suddenly, it was over. Somehow, the driver talked the gunmen down.

Once safe at their friend’s house, Ferah broke down. She wasn’t just trembling, her entire body spasmed.

This was the new, nightmare world that the Iraqi teen had to live in.

Ferah had never even heard of the Islamic State before the militants took over. As the summer of 2014 began, her world had seemed wide open. She’d finished her first year at a new private school, the best in the city, which she’d loved. She’d made new friends. Her classes were in English, her favorite subject. She dreamed of one day becoming an interior designer.

But in June, IS militants overran Mosul. The city fell in a night of chaos.

Around midnight, the streets around Ferah’s home lit up with headlights. Neighbors with suitcases piled into cars, soldiers threw bags into trucks, screeching away as artillery and gunfire echoed. Across the city, a panicked exodus erupted. Ferah’s two eldest sisters, who were married and lived nearby, called to say they were fleeing to the nearby Kurdish zone. Her best friend from school messaged that her family was leaving to Turkey.

Ferah’s family stayed.

The next morning, she woke up to a world ruled by the militants, sneeringly referred to by their Arabic acronym, Daesh.

As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, Ferah no longer wanted to go outside. It was too dangerous. She retreated into her bedroom, away from the horrors, from the stories of men being shot in public squares or women being stoned to death.

Her refuge would be in words. She put a candle into an old crystal, and by its faint glow, took out her IPad and wrote on her Facebook page. Just a few lines each day about a feeling or thought that had come to her, a fear or a hope.

She had no idea how long she would have to live like this, or whether she and her family would survive at all.

“What is the problem?” she asked in one of her imagined dialogues.

“The future is gone. It came crashing down.”

“How can I understand your feelings?”

“Be among Daesh. ... Try being a dreamer while sitting among Daesh.”

THE PLAGUE

Every day, there were more of the madmen. They were everywhere, with their long beards, their robes stopping above the ankle. They never smiled and seemed angry all the time.

When school started, it was under IS control too. Ferah’s private school remained shut, so she went to a public one. She was certain some girls in her class were Daesh. Their faces hidden under veils, they hardly talked to others and when they did it was to harshly judge.

Ferah was afraid of them. She stopped going to school.

The son of her family’s next-door neighbor emerged as an IS member. “How can you let him join them?” Ferah’s mom asked his mother, who just shrugged. Soon the woman’s husband too wore the militants’ clothes. The whole family was Daesh. These were people Ferah’s family had known for years; they visited each other’s houses. Ferah’s bedroom looked out on their home.

It was like a plague, spreading and transforming people.

One by one, Ferah’s remaining friends said goodbye, packing up for Turkey or the Kurdish areas.

Relatives and family friends who stayed behind dropped by her house regularly and talked about the news. Ferah heard about the laws handed down. Daesh banned smoking. During Ramadan, they arrested people suspected of not fasting. Rule-breakers were flogged in public squares.

The atrocities began. Hundreds of Shiite prisoners in Mosul’s main prison were killed. Policemen and soldiers were shot to death in the streets for all to see.

Ferah’s father, a university professor, used an Arabic saying to explain that Daesh was exploiting religion: “Speaking righteousness while committing evil,” he said. He and his wife had raised their four daughters to value education and faith. They were a religious Sunni Muslim family, and often prayed together. Ferah, her sisters and their mother wore headscarves, like almost all Muslim women in Mosul.

This was nothing like the Islam they knew.

Patrols by the Hisba religious police proliferated, enforcing ever-increasing regulations. Women were ordered to wear the niqab: the black robes, gloves and veil that hide any hint of their shapes and keep them sequestered from men’s gaze even in public.

Ferah hated wearing the niqab. She hated Daesh.

And she hated her life.

On the morning of Oct. 16, 2014, she had breakfast as usual, helped her mother with housework, showered, did her noon prayers.

Then she went into her room, locked the door and cried.

Her friends were gone. Her two eldest sisters were gone. One was pregnant when she fled, and now Ferah had a newborn niece she’d only seen in photos. She was isolated and lonely, afraid of going outside.

Dinnertime came and she didn’t emerge. Her parents became worried.

“You can get through this, Ferah,” they told her through the door.

“I need to be alone,” she sobbed back.

She wrote her thoughts in English on pieces of paper. Why is nothing going how I hoped? Why is this happening? She liked to write her deepest thoughts, ones she didn’t want anyone to know, in English, not Arabic. She would then cut up the papers, just like she wished she could cut up her reality, and store the pieces in a box in her wardrobe.

But late in the night after hours sitting on her bed, she tried something different. She wrote in Arabic.

“Suddenly life robs you of what you love, as if it’s punishing you for a crime that hasn’t been committed yet,” she wrote. “I’m afraid to care about the scattered remains of my soul, only to then lose it. Sometimes I’m afraid of happiness!”

She posted it on her Facebook page and felt, curiously, better— “like a light at the end of a mysterious path.”

THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE TEENS

Ferah had never thought of herself as a writer. But she started a separate Facebook page and posted every few days. Soon she had hundreds of followers, then several thousand.

She created a new world in her bedroom. She cut butterflies out of blue and red and green paper and hung them around her mirror. Butterflies are shining, optimistic. She draped strings of white fairy lights from the ceiling. She taped English letters on the wall: “Be yourself.”

And she lit her candle, to set the mood.

In her writing, she faced her greatest fear: Her life might never begin. Daesh might be here forever.

“When you close your eyes, you’ll feel how horrible it is to have your hands chained and be unable to picture your future. You’ll curl up on the ground crying.”

She knew she was emotional. She might cry for hours or burst from her room shouting, “What am I doing here? Everyone abandoned me.” Ferah’s sister just shrugged off the stress or slept. But the slightest provocation set Ferah off.

Her mom worried. She found excuses to drift into Ferah’s bedroom and check on her.

It was not easy to raise a teenager in a city run by fanatics. One wrong word could get you killed.

In the summer of 2015, news spread that a man was arrested after he pinpointed the house of Ferah’s Daesh neighbors to the U.S.-led coalition. Ferah’s family and others nearby decided to leave for a few days, convinced an airstrike was coming.

As they left, they saw the wife from the Daesh family, also fleeing.

Ferah flew into a rage. “Why are you leaving? Don’t you want martyrdom?” she screamed. “Go back in your house and let them strike it. You’ll go right to Paradise!”

Terrified, Ferah’s mother pulled her daughter away.

The neighbor’s house was never hit. The militants shot the alleged informant in the head in a public square, and the neighbor’s husband proudly showed the video, boasting, “This is the one who tried to target us.”

Soon after, on July 19, 2015, Ferah’s 15th birthday rolled around. Her mother tried to organize a party, but Ferah put a stop to that. She didn’t want to blow out candles and act like it was a happy birthday.

What was happy about it?

It wasn’t just the fear. The boredom was crippling.

Month after month, Ferah and her sister rattled around the house, trying to fill the agonizingly slow hours.

Night brought the closest thing to freedom: the internet. During the day, the provider put limits on usage that made it hard to even watch a video. But after midnight, the megabytes were unlimited.

Across Mosul, society rolled up behind closed doors, living nocturnal, virtual lives, and sleeping late into the long day. Even Ferah’s father was trapped. He had no job to go to because IS closed the universities. Also, his beard simply wouldn’t grow. So going outside risked harassment by the Hisba, which demanded men wear beards in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad. He spent his days largely in his study, writing a book.

Ferah read. She downloaded Arabic translations of self-help books. “Succeed for Yourself: Unlock Your Potential for Success and Happiness”, “You Will See It When You Believe It,” ″The Power of Intention.”

She liked “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” so much she read it twice. Habit #1: “Be proactive.” That meant saying, “I am the force. I am the captain of my life. I can choose my attitude.”

She turned to books on adolescence because she wanted to understand the developmental stage she was living through. She learned these were her formative years when her personality becomes defined.

Ferah realized: I can’t go on like this. If I am depressed and terrified, that way of thinking will stay with me forever.

It was no use complaining, she told herself. She must use this time to achieve something that would stay with her. She would be a dreamer among Daesh, she would be the captain of her life.

This would be her project.

Her Facebook journal grew. Her followers, more than 6,000 now, praised her writing, strengthening her.

One evening she noticed a new follow from an Iraqi girl. Ferah messaged asking why she’d friended her. “Because I looked at your profile and saw you were a good person,” the girl said.

This was Rania. She was from Mosul too, but her family had fled to Dahuk, in Kurdish territory. Ferah and Rania started chatting often, superficial things at first, then a friendship bloomed.

Still, all these steps seemed too small to keep out the reality of Daesh. “I know after all this time I was living in my dream world,” Ferah wrote. “A single word can turn all the pain back toward me.”

THE SCENT OF PARADISE

Nowhere in Mosul was there an escape from Daesh’s terror.

Once, Ferah drove with her parents to make one of their occasional checks on the house of Ferah’s eldest sister. They didn’t dare stop the car, they just rolled by slowly. The house had been confiscated, and now pro-IS families lived there. Ferah watched them in their short robes and beards and veils going in and out as if the house was their own.

The streets were a danger.

The Hisba’s prowling, obsessed eyes caught “errors” by women that the women themselves didn’t realize. Outside Ferah’s uncle’s house, they dragged away a passing girl. Her robes had swished open, and they spotted something red underneath, a forbidden dash of color in what was supposed to be an all-black garb.

Ferah’s own rooftop was a danger.

The roof was a place to catch a breeze on sweltering summer nights. But her family’s house was exposed, clearly visible from three directions. Who knew what they might accuse you of doing if they saw you there?

In a nearby neighborhood, a young girl, around 12, had gone up on her roof. By coincidence, a boy next door was on his roof at the same time. They were seen. Suspicions were raised.

Daesh arrested them and killed them both. The girl was stoned to death on the street in front of her house, the punishment for adultery. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it. They said when the stoning was over and the girl’s body was taken away, there lingered the warm smell of musk, one of the aromas of Paradise, a sure sign that she was innocent and God had taken her in.

Definitely never go on the roof.

The only safe place was inside four walls.

“Isn’t there a right to the freedom to dream, the freedom to have the best years of my life?” Ferah wrote. “I’d just like to know when I will really live.”

HER LITTLE WORKS

Inside her room, Ferah went deeper in a world becoming ever more elaborate.

From Instagram and Tumblr, she printed photos of faces or fashion she liked and taped them above her bed. “Everything you imagine is real,” read one poster. Another showed a girl wearing fairy wings. “What if I fall?” the picture asked — and then replied, “Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?”

Her paper cut-outs multiplied, not just butterflies but flowers, hearts, a nest of baby birds. She called them “her little works.”

The light of her candle encouraged her. “Speak to me often,” it said. “I am here to muse and ponder with you.”

At night, she explored online. She discovered a whole microculture of interior design enthusiasts on YouTube. Her favorite: Anything IKEA. She practiced her English watching cartoons. She watched “White House Down” with Channing Tatum over and over until she understood almost all the dialogue.

Most wonderful was her friendship with Rania.

They had similar tastes. Rania sent a picture of herself, and her dress was just like something Ferah would wear. They decorated rooms together online, trading pictures of furniture.

Ferah had never seen Rania in person, yet their friendship grew deeper than any she’d had as a child. Maybe because it was born out of difficulty. At her worst moments, Ferah would hear the chime of a message from Rania, and she knew she just had to open it and she would laugh.

“I’m sad that one sky looks over both of us, yet we don’t meet, that digital photos bring us together and yet we don’t meet,” Ferah wrote. Yet she thanked God: Breaking through the distance “is absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.”

At least within the world she created in her room she could find comfort and wander far online with her friends, her writings and her readers.

Then that too was gone.

On her 16th birthday, July 19, 2016, Daesh shut the internet down.

IS was sealing off Mosul’s population. It feared spies guiding American airstrikes as Iraqi forces further south started their long march toward the city, aiming to take back Daesh’s greatest stronghold.

Ferah was alone.

She began to sew, taking lessons from a family friend. She loved it. She worked at the machine sometimes until 3 a.m. and eventually made nearly 20 outfits, giving some away as gifts.

And she wrote — for herself now not her followers. She composed long ruminations, challenging herself and facing her doubts.

As months passed, she found that her little works — her crafts, her clothes, her writings — were her secret successes. They had given her confidence to stand on her own.

“No one can stop you when trust in what’s inside you, when survival is in your heart even as your body is drowning, when light is inside you even as darkness is around you,” she wrote. “I’ll ... force my reality to submit to my desires and reach my goals. Even when difficulties grow, I will not break. Go on, war, get worse.”

There was just one person outside she yearned for. For Rania’s birthday, she wrote her a message.

“I’m building an eternal place for you within me,” she told her. “Whenever I think I’ll declare my surrender, you pass by and I become certain that, with you there, I can never surrender ... Thank you for your heart, my friend, my flower, my galaxy, my butterfly. I love you very, very much.”

On the top floor of her house, she could get a faint signal on her SIM card. She stood in just the right place, held her phone up and, hitting send, prayed her message, byte by byte, would make its way to the friend she had never met.

ASHES

In January 2017, Daesh burst into Ferah’s world.

Iraqi forces battled their way into eastern Mosul in tough urban warfare. The militants took over homes, dug in to fight and bloody the advancing forces, then fell back to the next neighborhood. The city shook with gunfire, car bombs and airstrikes.

One evening, there came a banging at the front gate. They didn’t answer; they were inside praying. So the Daesh gunmen shot through the gate.

“Everyone out, the gunmen ordered. They wanted the house; the roof would give their snipers good views. Ferah was outraged seeing these boys with guns, no older than 17 and clearly from villages outside Mosul, shouting at her father, a respectable man in his 50s. Even in this critical moment before battle, they berated him for not growing his beard.

Ferah’s family took refuge with a neighbor. Huddling in a single room, they could hear the fighters next door, clunking up and down stairs. They waited hours for the storm of battle to descend.

Just before dawn, it struck. The rocket fire burst, the guns hammered. The “wzzzzzzzzzzz!” that always preceded an airstrike grew closer and closer.

Then a giant blast. The room went black. Part of the ceiling collapsed. They struggled to breathe, and the neighbor’s young children screamed in the darkness. Ferah and her sister screamed too.. Ferah’s father was silent, stunned.

As suddenly as the storm came, it moved on. Daesh retreated, and troops from the Iraqi 8th Army were fanning out in the streets around Ferah’s home. After nearly three years, their neighborhood was out of the fanatics’ control and in government hands.

Ferah, her parents and sister emerged from their refuge, unsure of what was happening.

“The family of the burning house is coming out. Don’t shoot them,” an army officer said into his walkie-talkie.

Ferah stood in front of her home. Flames gushed from its windows in shapes she could hardly bear to look at. The flames were in her room.

The Daesh fighters had set off explosives in the kitchen before fleeing.

When the fire died down, the family went in. Ferah’s room had melted. The walls were black, the paint peeled back in painful, obscene shreds. The ceiling had fallen onto her bed.

Her little works were ash — the butterflies, the lights, the paper hearts and birds, the clothes, even the box in her wardrobe filled with cut-up papers bearing her deepest thoughts in English.

“I saw my dreams ... as they turned to nothing,” she wrote. “My trust in tomorrow slipped away ... My heart has burned up.”

EPILOGUE

But it was not the end.

After the fire, her family stayed with Ferah’s eldest sister in Irbil. From there, her father oversaw the rebuilding of their home. Ferah took a high school refresher course and passed. When classes finally resumed, she would be only a grade behind.

They visited Ferah’s sister, in Dahuk, and met her daughter, now nearly 3.

One morning, Ferah dropped by a school in Dahuk and found a group of schoolgirls gathered in the halls before class. She looked for one in particular.

Rania didn’t realize it was her until Ferah stood right in front of her.

“For real? You came?” Rania cried.

“This is the Ferah you’ve been talking to all these years!” the other girls laughed.

The two girls held each other for 10 long minutes. Rania showed Ferah her phone: She’d kept screenshots of their best chats. Among them was Ferah’s birthday message that had found its way to her.

Back home in Mosul now, Ferah’s room is repainted, but it’s not the sanctuary it once was. Her mother hauled out of storage an old bedroom set from her childhood that Ferah hates. She misses her butterflies, but she won’t put any up until she buys new furniture, hopefully from IKEA.

Nothing is normal. But she has her freedom. She is still a dreamer, but not among Daesh.

Sometimes, she looks back at one of her favorite texts. A love song to herself. She wrote it amid her hopelessness, praising the good she discovered in herself.

“Good morning to everyone who feels the beauty within — no matter who it angers,” she reads to herself. “Glory to the fading light of endings and the burst of new beginnings. Everything else won’t last long.”

Ferah and her family spoke to The Associated Press on condition that their full names not be used and that some identifying details not be mentioned out of fear for their safety in Mosul. Keath reported from Cairo.

By Susannah George, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Maggie Michael and Lori Hinnant

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — The price Mosul’s residents paid in blood to see their city freed was 9,000 to 11,000 dead, a civilian casualty rate nearly 10 times higher than what has been previously reported. The number killed in the nine-month battle to liberate the city from the Islamic State group marauders has not been acknowledged by the U.S.-led coalition, the Iraqi government or the self-styled caliphate.

But Mosul’s gravediggers, its morgue workers and the volunteers who retrieve bodies from the city’s rubble are keeping count.

Iraqi or coalition forces are responsible for at least 3,200 civilian deaths from airstrikes, artillery fire or mortar rounds between October 2016 and the fall of the Islamic State group in July 2017, according to an Associated Press investigation that cross-referenced independent databases from non-governmental organizations.

Most of those victims are simply described as “crushed” in health ministry reports.

The coalition, which says it lacks the resources to send investigators into Mosul, acknowledges responsibility for only 326 of the deaths.

“It was the biggest assault on a city in a couple of generations, all told. And thousands died,” said Chris Woods, head of Airwars , an independent organization that documents air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria and shared its database with the AP.

“There doesn’t seem to be any disagreement about that, except from the federal government and the coalition. And understanding how those civilians died, and obviously ISIS played a big part in that as well, could help save a lot of lives the next time something like this has to happen. And the disinterest in any sort of investigation is very disheartening,” Woods said, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group.

In addition to the Airwars database, the AP analyzed information from Amnesty International , Iraq Body Count and a United Nations report. The AP also obtained a list of 9,606 people killed during the operation from Mosul’s morgue. Hundreds of dead civilians are believed to still be buried in the rubble.

Of the nearly 10,000 deaths the AP found, around a third of the casualties died in bombardments by the U.S.-led coalition or Iraqi forces, the AP analysis found. Another third of the dead were killed in the Islamic State group’s final frenzy of violence. And it could not be determined which side was responsible for the deaths of the remainder, who were cowering in neighborhoods battered by airstrikes, IS explosives and mortar rounds from all sides.

But the morgue total would be many times higher than official tolls. Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi told the AP that 1,260 civilians were killed in the fighting. The U.S.-led coalition has not offered an overall figure. The coalition relies on drone footage, video from cameras mounted on weapons systems and pilot observations. Its investigators have neither visited the morgue nor requested its data.

What is clear from the tallies is that as coalition and Iraqi government forces increased their pace, civilians were dying in ever higher numbers at the hands of their liberators: from 20 the week the operation began in mid-October 2016 to 303 in a single week at the end of June 2017, according to the AP tally.

Abdel-Hafiz Mohammed, who kept his job as undertaker throughout the militants’ rule, has carved approximately 2,000 headstones for the al-Jadidah graveyard since October 2016.

After the city fell to IS in 2014, undertakers like him handled the victims of beheadings and stonings; there were men accused of homosexuality who had been flung from rooftops. But once the operation to free the city started, the scope of Mohammed’s work changed yet again.

“Now I carve stones for entire families,” Mohammed said, gesturing to a stack of four headstones, all bearing the same name. “It’s a single family, all killed in an airstrike.”

DYING AT HOME, ON THE FRONT

Mosul was home to more than a million civilians before the fight to retake it from IS. Fearing a massive humanitarian crisis, the Iraqi government dropped leaflets or had soldiers tell families to stay put as the final battle loomed in late 2016.

Thousands were trapped when the front line enveloped densely populated neighborhoods.

Blast injuries, gunshot and shrapnel killed thousands as the Mosul operation ground westward, according to morgue documents.

When Iraqi forces became bogged down in late December, the Pentagon adjusted the rules regarding the use of airpower, allowing airstrikes to be called in by more ground commanders with less chain-of-command oversight.

At the same time, Islamic State group fighters took thousands of civilians with them in their retreat west. They packed hundreds of families into schools and government buildings, sometimes shunting civilians through tunnels from one fighting position to another.

They expected the tactic would dissuade airstrikes and artillery. They were wrong.

As the fight punched into western Mosul, the morgue logs filled with civilians increasingly killed by being “blown to pieces.”

By early March, Iraqi officials and the U.S.-led coalition could see that civilian deaths were spiking, but held the course. The result, in Mosul and later in the group’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, was a city left in ruins by the battle to save it.

Most of the civilians killed in west Mosul died under the weight of collapsed buildings, hit by airstrikes, mortars, artillery shells or IS-laid explosives. The morgue provided lists of names of civilians and place of death. Names often included entire families.

The coalition has defended its operational choices, saying it was the Islamic State group that put civilians in danger as it clung to power.

“It is simply irresponsible to focus criticism on inadvertent casualties caused by the Coalition’s war to defeat ISIS,” Col. Thomas Veale, a coalition spokesman, told the AP in response to questions about civilian deaths.

“Without the Coalition’s air and ground campaign against ISIS, there would have inevitably been additional years, if not decades of suffering and needless death and mutilation in Syria and Iraq at the hands of terrorists who lack any ethical or moral standards,” he added.

Civilian deaths in the second half of the battle reflected the looser rules of engagement for airstrikes and the sheer numbers of trapped residents. From Oct. 17 to Feb. 19, the AP tally found at least 576 deaths by coalition or Iraqi munitions.

From Feb. 19 — when the fight crossed the Tigris River — to mid-July, there were nearly 2,400 civilian deaths. That total is in addition to the 326 confirmed by the coalition in the city. The U.S. and Australia are the only two coalition countries to acknowledge civilian deaths, though France had fighter jets and artillery and the UK also carried out airstrikes.

Of the nearly 10,000 names listed by the morgue, around 4,200 were confirmed as civilian dead in the battle. The AP discarded names that were obviously those of Islamic State group fighters and casualties brought in from outside Mosul. Among the remaining 6,000 are likely some number of Islamic State group extremists, but the morgue civilian toll tracks closely with numbers gathered during the battle itself by Airwars and others.

Neither toll includes thousands of people killed by the Islamic State group who are believed to be in mass graves in and around Mosul, including as many as 4,000 in the natural crevasse known as Khasfa.

Imad Ibrahim, a civil defense rescuer from west Mosul, survived the battle to retake the city and is now tasked with excavating the dead. He mostly works in the Old City, where on a recent day the streets still reeked of rotting flesh.

“Sometimes you can see the bodies. They’re visible under the rubble. Other times we dig for hours, and suddenly find 15 to 30 all in one place. That’s when you know they were sheltering, hiding from the airstrikes,” Ibrahim said.

Behind him an excavator dug through jagged cement blocks, searching for the body of a woman who was hiding in her home when it was hit by an airstrike.

Ibrahim said he spent years waiting for liberation, but the victory itself was hollow.

“Honestly, none of this was worth it.”

DIGGING INTO DEATH

By dawn, dozens of Mosul families begin to line up outside the civil defense office each day. One by one they flatly describe their personal tragedies: “We buried my cousin’s body in the garden under the tree.” ″My mother was hiding in the back of the house, near the kitchen when the airstrike hit her home.” ″We buried my father in the street in front of our home after he was shot.”

Radwan Majid said he lost both his children to an airstrike in May.

“There were three Daesh in front of my house, so when the airstrike hit, it also killed my children,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

“We can see their bodies under the rubble, but we can’t reach them by ourselves,” he said. “All I want is to give them a proper burial.”

Reports of civilian deaths began to dominate military planning meetings in Baghdad in February and early March, according to a senior Western diplomat who was present but not authorized to speak on the record.

After a single coalition strike killed more than 100 civilians in Mosul’s al-Jadidah neighborhood on March 17, the entire fight was put on hold for three weeks. Under intense international pressure , the coalition sent a team into the city to investigate.

Iraq’s special forces units were instructed that they were no longer allowed to call in strikes on buildings. Instead, the forces were told to call in airstrikes on gardens and roads adjacent to IS group targets.

A WhatsApp group shared by coalition advisers and Iraqi forces coordinating airstrikes previously named “killing daesh 24/7” was wryly renamed “scaring daesh 24/7.”

“It was clear that the whole strategy in western Mosul had to be reconfigured,” said the Western diplomat.

But on the ground, Iraqi special forces officers said after the operational pause, they returned to the fight just as before.

The WhatsApp group’s name was changed back to “killing daesh.”

The Pentagon investigation into the March strike concluded that a U.S. bomb resulted in the deaths of 105 civilians but ultimately blamed secondary explosions from IS-laid bombs.

The 500-pound (227-kilogram) bomb, the investigation concluded, “appropriately balanced the military necessity of neutralizing (two IS) snipers.” Witnesses and survivors told the AP that IS had not set any explosives in the house that was hit. The house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting.

At the time, just two American officers were fielding all allegations of civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria from a base in Kuwait. The team now has seven members, though none sets foot inside Mosul or routinely collects physical evidence.

The Americans say they do not have the resources to send a team into Mosul; an AP reporter visited the morgue six times in six weeks and spoke to morgue officials and staffers dozens of times in person and over the phone.

Because of what the coalition considers insufficient information, the majority of civilian casualty allegations are deemed “not credible” before an investigation ever begins .

Col. Joseph Scrocca, a coalition spokesman, defended the coalition figures in an interview in May, saying they may seem low because of a meticulous process designed to “get to the truth” and help protect civilians in the future.

“I do believe the victims of these strikes deserve to know what happened to their families, Scrocca said. “We owe them that.”

Daoud Salem Mahmoud survived the fight for the Old City by hiding with his family in a windowless room deep inside their home.

With the fight over, Mahmoud now returns to his neighborhood daily to retrieve the dead. He’s recovered hundreds of bodies of extended family members and neighbors.

A large, imposing figure, Mahmoud breaks down in tears when asked to describe specific events at the height of the violence. But without a moment of hesitation, he said he believes the fight to retake the city was worthwhile.

Despite the death and destruction, he said he now feels like his family has a chance at a future brighter than his own.

“Everything can be rebuilt. It’s the lives lost that cannot be replaced,” he said. Then, shaking his head, he added, “This war, it turned Mosul into a graveyard.”

Michael reported from Cairo and Hinnant from Paris.

By Susannah George and Lori Hinnant

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — For nearly 2½ miles along the western bank of the Tigris River, hardly a single building is intact. The warren of narrow streets of Mosul’s Old City is a crumpled landscape of broken concrete and metal. Every acre is weighed down by more than 3,000 tons of rubble, much of it laced with explosives and unexploded ordnance.

It will take years to haul away the wreckage, and this is just one corner of the destruction. The Iraqi military and U.S.-led coalition succeeded in uprooting the Islamic State group across the country, but the cost of victory is nearly incalculable.

Three years of war devastated much of northern and western Iraq. Baghdad estimates $100 billion is needed nationwide to rebuild. Local leaders in Mosul, the biggest city held by IS, say that amount is needed to rehabilitate their city alone.

So far no one is offering to foot the bill. The Trump administration has told the Iraqis it won’t pay for a massive reconstruction drive. Iraq hopes Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries will step up, and Iran may also take a role. The U.N. is repairing some infrastructure in nearly two dozen towns and cities around Iraq, but funding for it is a fraction of what will be needed. As a result, much of the rebuilding that has happened has come from individuals using personal savings to salvage homes and shops as best they can.

Nearly every city or town in former IS territory needs repair to one degree or another. The longer it takes, the longer many of those who fled IS or the fighting remain uprooted. While 2.7 million Iraqis have returned to lands seized back from the militants, more than 3 million others cannot and they languish in camps. Worst hit is Mosul; the U.N. estimates 40,000 homes there need to be rebuilt or restored, and some 600,000 residents have been unable to return to the city, once home to around 2 million people.

Corruption and bitter sectarian divisions make things even harder. The areas with the worst destruction are largely Sunni, while the Baghdad government is Shiite-dominated. The fear is that if Sunni populations feel they’ve been abandoned and left to fend for themselves in shattered cities, the resentment will feed the next generation of militants.

“The responsibility to pay for reconstruction falls with the international community,” said Abdulsattar al-Habu, the director of Mosul municipality and reconstruction adviser to Nineveh province, where the city is located.

If Mosul is not rebuilt, he said, “it will result in the rebirth of terrorism.”

FROM HUE TO MOSUL

Mosul’s Old City paid the price for the Islamic State group’s last stand.

Streets are now knee-deep in rubble from destroyed homes. The few high buildings of six or seven stories have been blasted hollow, reduced to concrete frames. Shopping centers and office buildings are pancaked slabs. Almost all that is left of the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque, blown up by IS fighters as they fled, is the stump of its famed minaret.

At the southern end of the district, the arcades of stone-arched storefronts in the historic bazaars that once sold spices, cloth and household goods are charred and gutted. Eaves that once shaded shoppers look like they were hurled into the air to land as mangled metal scattered across the cityscape. At the northern end just outside the Old City, some buildings have been blown to splinters and piles of dirt in a large medical compound that housed the College of Medicine and the Jomhouriya Hospital.

All five bridges crossing the Tigris have been disabled by airstrikes, forcing all traffic onto a single-lane temporary span linking east and west.

A debris field the same size in New York City would run from the 9/11 Memorial nearly to 18th Street and cover nearly a quarter of Manhattan south of Central Park.

There were effectively two battles for Mosul. The first, from October to February, freed the city’s east, which survived largely intact. The second pulverized the west side. There, IS dug in and the Iraqis and U.S.-led coalition upped their firepower, culminating in house-to-house fighting in the Old City. The city, which IS overran in the summer of 2014, was declared liberated in July. An Associated Press investigationfound at least 9,000 civilians died in the assault to retake Mosul, most in the west.

The Old City shows the densest destruction, but nearly every neighborhood of western Mosul has blocks of blasted houses, industrial areas, government buildings and infrastructure.

It’s been more than a generation since the last comparable fight to seize a city. Military experts compare the assaults on Mosul and IS-held Raqqa in Syria to the devastating 1968 battle for the Vietnamese city of Hue.

Some look even further back. “All I can think of is Dresden, or pictures I’ve seen of World War II,” said Stephen Wood, a senior analyst at the satellite imagery firm DigitalGlobe.

Along the Old City’s gutted roads, a handful of people are beginning to rebuild. Amar Ismail Brahim sold his wife’s gold to repaint his cafe. He didn’t bother asking for government aid.

Brahim ultimately blames the Islamic State group for the destruction, but he believes the obligation of reconstruction lies with the United States and other Western countries.

“We fought Daesh on behalf of the whole world,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. “Now is the time for them to stand with Mosul.”

WRENCHING HOMECOMINGS

The enormity of the task ahead in Mosul can be grasped by what has — and hasn’t — happened in Ramadi , the capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province. Two years after it was retaken from IS, more than 70 percent of the city remains damaged or destroyed, according to the provincial council.

Nearly 8,300 homes — almost a third of the houses in the city — were destroyed or suffered major damage, according to UN Habitat. All five of Ramadi’s bridges over the Euphrates River were damaged; only three are currently under repair. Three-quarters of the schools remain out of commission.

The Anbar provincial council holds its meetings in a small building down the street from the pile of rubble that was once its offices. Nearly all of Ramadi’s government buildings were blown up by the militants.

“We haven’t received a single dollar in reconstruction money from Baghdad,” said Ahmed Shaker, a council member. “When we ask the government for money to rebuild, they said: ’Help yourself, go ask your friends in the Gulf” — a reference to fellow Sunnis.

So people in Ramadi borrow, beg and compromise.

Halayl Sharqii and his wife Hanna returned in 2016 and found their house destroyed.

“All I remember doing is picking up the pieces of our furniture in a blanket,” said the 75-year-old Halayl.

Like most of their neighbors, they borrowed money from extended family to partially rebuild their modest two-room house. A Qatari aid organization helped fix the roof of one room. All around, other houses are in similar states of semi-repair; on one home, bullet-holes are patched up with cement, while its neighbor is still missing walls. Weeds are thick in neglected gardens around damaged homes that remain abandoned.

On one street corner, children clamber up a collapsed apartment building and pick through the rubble. The former residents pay them 1,000 Iraqi dinars (a little less than a U.S. dollar) for each family photograph or identification document they retrieve from the dust and concrete.

Most of Ramadi’s pre-IS population of around a half million has returned. Restaurants and shops are reopening along main streets, and traffic churns through scores of checkpoints. Iraqi officials cite that as a sign of success.

But like many others, the Sharqiis’ decision to return was out of desperation, not hope. Their savings were drained and they wore out their welcome in a crowded home with extended family in Baghdad.

“We had no other choice but to return,” Halayl said.

‘NOT GOING TO HAPPEN’

The main engine for rebuilding has been the stabilization program run by the U.N. development agency, known as UNDP, which focuses on rehabilitating infrastructure, including roads, water and electricity systems and schools, as well as some homes.

Its daily project notices are ambitious. To clear debris from Mosul’s riverbank neighborhood of al-Madain, a single contractor must have three heavy-duty shovels, six mini dump trucks, six tractor-trailers, two excavators and 2 tons of black trash bags. The timeframe: 45 days. Workers must be locals and must earn no less than $20 a day.

But funding is far lower than what Iraq says it needs. So far, stabilization has received some $392 million in contributions. The United States has given the lion’s share, some $115 million. Germany is the second biggest donor at $64 million. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are also contributing, but no other Gulf nations are among the list of donors.

Overall, Washington has contributed $265 million to reconstruction since 2014, on top of $1.7 billion in humanitarian assistance in Iraq. That is a fraction of the $14.3 billion that the U.S. spent in fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

And it’s far less than what Iraqis hoped. Baghdad at first expected American money would flow in after the defeat of IS, said a senior U.S. official in Washington who regularly meets with Iraqi leadership. But Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said the United States is no longer in the business of “nation-building.”

“We just tell them, no, it’s not going to happen,” the U.S. official said. “We have to be up front with them.”

The official said many in Washington believe past efforts in Iraq didn’t yield adequate returns and there is little appetite for large international reconstruction projects. After the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. pumped $60 billion over nine years into Iraqi reconstruction. Critics say the money did little to prevent political disarray and the rise of militants in Iraq. About $8 billion dollars of it was wasted through corruption and mismanagement, according to the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Douglas Silliman, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, blamed the destruction of Iraqi cities squarely on IS fighters.

“Had they not been here, had they not conducted a completely brutal and inhumane campaign against the Iraqi people, this destruction would not have happened,” he said.

In mid-July, just as Mosul was declared free of IS, German Ambassador Ekkehard Brose, then co-chair of the coalition working group on stabilizing Iraq, warned against the U.S. attitude staying out of reconstruction. In a debate with an American counterpart, he said the U.S. had “a lot to answer for in the situation in Iraq.”

“Say a year after the last city’s been retaken from the IS, stabilization slowly peters out and then there’s nothing,” said Brose, whose country returned from the ashes of World War II with the help of the U.S.-led Marshall Plan. “Who fills that vacuum?”

The answer to that could be new militants, Iran or Russia, he said.

“If you like any of those options, don’t do reconstruction.”

Hinnant reported from Paris.