Mosul and the Law of the Cigarette
“Remember the Law of the Cigarette,” says my fixer Mohammed as we approach a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul. We’ve spent the morning driving through a landscape scarred by the war against Isis. Villages are filled with ruined buildings and pitted roads. Posters of those martyred dot the highway, as they do almost everywhere in Iraq.
We join a short queue and a guard looks vaguely in our direction. “Ok, prepare the cigarette. Oh, and take off your seatbelt. If you’re not smoking and you’re wearing a seatbelt, it means you’re UN, which is a problem because it means paperwork.” I do as instructed, and also take out a set of prayer beads I bought in Baghdad. “Nice touch,” says Mohammed with a grin as we pass through with ease.
Mosul suffered more than almost any other Iraqi city following the US invasion. The removal of Saddam brought the people a taste of democracy, but it also unleashed a sectarian war, mainly between Sunni and Shia. Of many things the carnage spawned, the Sunni terror group Isis was arguably the worst.
In December 2013, after an attack on the city of Fallujah, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of al-Qaeda’s pathologically anti-Shia offshoot the “Islamic State of Iraq”, announced he was forming the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. Six months later, it captured Mosul, Iraq’s second most important city. From the pulpit of the city’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, al-Baghdadi proclaimed the birth of a new worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
David Patrikarakos for Unherd.
