Mosul is an ancient Muslim city reshaped first by Sadddam Hussein’s ubiquitous concrete construction and now by ISIL’s demented dreams.

Mosul has been depopulated. Before ISIL took over in 2014, the city had a population of 1.8 million. Today, just over 700,000 people remain. The rest are dead or have fled. But when the city was taken, ISIL barely fired a shot. The killing took place in an orderly fashion after the city surrendered.

On some blocks there is no battle damage to be seen. Others are in rubble from U.S. and Iraqi airstrikes.

Large portions of the city are silent, with few people in the streets and absolutely no unaccompanied women. Women who do emerge are accompanied by male relatives and wear the niqab, which covers everything but the eyes. No woman works at any job in public except a few members of Al-Khansaa Brigade, a small, all-female branch of Al-Hisbah tasked with punishing women for moral failings.

ISIL graffiti covers the walls of buildings, either exhorting the populace to greater devotion, or designating buildings as having become the property of ISIL. The call to prayer (adhan) comes five times and day and is strictly enforced.

Cell phone networks have been down since 2014. There is no music. There is no television. Private satellite dishes have been removed.

Nevertheless, the streets are impeccably clean. Garbage service is run under the threat of imprisonment and corporal punishment. There aren’t even cigarette butts on the sidewalks, not the least because ISIL has declared smoking cigarettes a flogging offense. Occasionally a severed head is displayed at an execution site with a cigarette stuck between its lips to drive home the point about repeat offenders.

Corporal punishment motivates much of the city’s services. If it is physically possible for the water, gas, or electricity to function, then it functions. ISIL has threatened city workers with imprisonment and death should they fail at their jobs.

The rainy season has ended. Dust churned up by vehicle traffic stings the eyes and coats the nostrils despite round-the-clock street sweeping.

Driving through Mosul is slow. Car and truck traffic is limited to official and commercial purposes, but checkpoints dot the city, especially on bridges crossing the Tigris River. The bored young men manning these checkpoints enthusiastically flaunt their authority. Drivers are often seen kneeling on the road next to their trucks while gunmen strut about with AK-47s, searching vehicles and examining travel documents for an excuse to start shooting. This creates traffic jams.

Large intersections, particularly those with traffic circles, are where the regime displays the bodies of those they have executed for crimes against the state and God. The bodies are left out for days in the sun. The smell of death in these places is ever-present. Heads are often piled separately from the bodies.

Whole cadavers are left hanging from pedestrian and vehicle overpasses so drivers are forced to see them as they drive beneath. Sometimes the swarming maggots drop down onto the cars as they drive beneath the corpses. The dead are guarded lest the families try to take the bodies away for proper Islamic funerals. Guarding the dead is not preferred duty. The stench of death often keeps the guards edgy and
short tempered.