I was in Mosul when ISIS overthrew the city in 2014. I recorded everything I saw and evaded the terrorists hunting me

On June 10, 2014, the city of Mosul — Iraq’s second largest, home to nearly two million people, built on and around the ruins of the Assyrian capital Nineveh — fell to the Islamic State in a single night.The Iraqi Army dissolved.

Soldiers abandoned their uniforms in the streets.By morning, a city that had been continuously inhabited for 7,000 years belonged to a force that intended to abolish everything it had been.I was inside the city when it fell.

I am a historian.When ISIS took Mosul, I made a choice that would define the next three years of my life and reshape everything I understood about myself: I stayed.

I documented.I refused to let the occupiers become the sole authors of what was happening to my city.I was at the University of Mosul when the order came.

The security forces issued clear instructions: Everyone must go home.We began running.

It is never safe to stay on the streets when Mosul locks down, and even before I understood why this curfew felt different from the others, I could see it in the faces of the people around me.They were not moving with the annoyed haste of people managing another interruption.

The sky was dusty and red. In the early morning hours of June 10 — while gunfire still sounded from the western districts — I had posted on my personal Facebook page, simply noting that I could hear the attacks.A friend messaged me within minutes, warning that I was risking everything. He was right.

I did not stop taking notes, but I stopped posting under my own name.The observation continued; the exposure did not.

That shift — from public voice to hidden recorder — was the first step toward what came next, though I did not yet understand where it would lead. By the afternoon of June 17, I created an anonymous blog on WordPress and wrote the words that mark the real beginning of “Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS.” I chose the name Mosul Eye because I wanted the city to have an eye that saw what was b...