Muhammad almost lost his life one day when he walked on the street with a small mobile phone in his pocket. It was the time when Daesh (also known as ISIS) had instilled its terror regime in Mosul, the city which got to be the terrorists most important stronghold in Iraq. The terrorists ‘police’ shouted at him from the distance. Neither the “normal” trousers Muhammad was wearing nor the mobile phone which they had not discovered yet, were permitted. He panicked.

“I began banging on the houses’ walls. I was so in fear, I didn’t realize they were not doors. I couldn’t breathe. If they searched me and they found my mobile, they would kill me”

“I began banging on the houses’ walls. I was so in fear, I didn’t realize they were not doors. I couldn’t breathe. If they searched me and they found my mobile, they would kill me”, he remembers now on the other side of the phone line from Mosul. He started to cough so loud, that other people began to gather around him to try and help him. They offered him water. Given the crowd that had come together, ISIS guards left. “Those people saved my life”, he says convinced.

“We want Christians to come back”

Today Muhammad is one of Sawaed al Mosuliya volunteers (Arms of Mosul), an NGO which has restored Saint Thomas church in the heart of Mosul’s city centre. The took out the rubble, cleaned up and reinstalled the light.

The terrorists destroyed the church, as well as the famous Al Noori mosque. Saint Thomas served as prison during ISIS regime. Muhammad explains the Christian temple means a lot to Mosul’s people after the horror they had to endure: “During the liberation battles in Mosul, there was no running water. The only source of water was an old well inside the church. This church was a source of life”.

“During the liberation battles in Mosul, there was no running water. The only source of water was an old well inside the church. This church was a source of life”

“Since I was a child, Muslim and Christian families used to visit each other for the religious feasts, such as Christmas. There was a church where we used to go to. I miss that, I want those traditions to come back”, Muhammad adds.

As for Ziad, the volunteers’ coordinator, he recalls that before the terrorists took the city, he shared life with his neighbours and friends without caring about the religion of one another: “It wasn’t an issue. We didn’t even know who was Christian”. But now he knows 15 families on his street and wants to rebuild their houses to help them come back.  

Why focusing on the houses of Christians, given that Daesh persecuted everyone, also Muslims? “Because tens of thousands of people who fled are coming back, but not even one Christian person who lived here has done the same”, he explains. Two of his best friends used to live in those houses and they call him almost every day to know how the situation is. “They want to come back, but they’re afraid”.

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Their work restoring the historic Saint Thomas church, thanks to the financial support of USAID, was the first step to be able to use the temple again for a religious service. At the same time, it revealed a symbol of hope in the city being reborn. “When we published the pictures on internet, people from other parts of Mosul began asking where this church was. They wanted to visit it. Some of my Christian friends cried and thanked us”, Muhammad says.

“Since I was a child, Muslim and Christian families used to visit each other for the religious feasts, such as Christmas. There was a church where we used to go to. I miss that, I want those traditions to come back”

They had already planned an interreligious event in the church just before the coronavirus pandemic exploded, so it had to be postponed. Now there is a man from Erbil who goes from time to time sent by the Christian community of that city. He is finishing the electric work on the church. Ziad and Muhammad have seen how the neighbours of the area usually go to him to offer him some water or other kind of help.

The volunteers of Sawaed al Mosuliya were founded in June 2018, when they began cleaning up the rubble and rubbish of tens of houses. The founded a supermarket whose incomes go to the people in need. They also help orphans and take part in interreligious events hand in hand with Christians and Jazidis in favour of a peaceful together living. “We’re doing all we can so that everyone comes back. They’re all welcome”, Ziad underlines.

Bring back normality to defeat ISIS

When the terrorists took Mosul back in 2014, Ziad was doing his master, he had a shop and lived with his family. “Life was good. When Daesh arrived, their mission was to destroy life in the city and its residents. They forced me to flee to Turkey with my family. They took my house and my shop”.

Ziad estimates 25.000 homes were destroyed. Now he wants to “bring back normality as a way to defeat Daesh”. He got married one month ago, has a minimarket and his doing his PhD in Modern History at the Faculty of Education. He hopes to find a full-time job when he finishes his studies.

Muhammad had to close his mobile phone shop when Daesh arrived, and his Economics studies had to wat. Instead of graduating in 2015, when the terrorists dominated the city, he graduated in 2018. He stayed in the city, but his brothers -who worked in the media sector- had to flee to Europe and they have not seen each other since.

Both of them dream of a “stable and peaceful life” in their city. Together with other volunteers, they will go on cleaning up the rubble of war and the damage the terrorists left behind.

“We’re doing all we can so that everyone comes back. They’re all welcome”

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Muslims in the United Kingdom have suffered two attacks on mosques in London in recent years. In both cases they were abuses or attempts of abuse at the exit of the sentence. The 48-year-old British terrorist Darren Osborne was sentenced to life imprisonment for his attack on June 19, 2017 outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London. He killed one person and left another 12 injured. He has to serve at least 43 years in jail.

Martin Stokes, 25, also tried to run over citizens with his car when they were outside another London mosque in Cricklewood on September 19 last year. He left three people injured. Barely a week ago, on March 6, he was sentenced to 5 years. Stokes admitted dangerous driving, the BBC reported. He had parked with some friends in a private area and they were bothering him, so they were asked to leave. He responded by ramming the car to the people who were there while he uttered Islamophobic and racist insults against them, witnesses said.

In Quebec (Canada), Alexander Bissonnette was also just recently sentenced for his attack on a mosque, where he shot six people dead in January 2017. The 29-year-old has been sentenced to 40 years without parole.

“The attack in New Zealand is the best example that all extremist ideologies are more similar than you might think,” said OIET director Carlos Igualada, through on his Twitter feed. At the same time, he pointed out that the terrorist groups like Daesh or Al Qaeda will soon use the attacks of this Friday in Christchurch in their own benefit and as an excuse to make propaganda in favor hitting back. They will not remind their followers that they usually kill Muslim people.

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La entrada Attacks against mosques are more usual than you might think: they are committed by anti-Muslim terrorists and also by groups like ISIS se publicó primero en Salam Plan.

Can we speak of a real takeover of Raqqa (Syria), which ISIS considers its capital? Colonel Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the US-led coalition against the terrorist group, acknowledged on Tuesday that 10% of the city was yet to be “cleared”. Something similar happened in the case of the other main stronghold Daesh had in Mosul (Iraq): weeks passed since the Iraqi forces announced it had been “freed” until it was effectively cleared of the terrorists’ partial control.

In the present case, however, there are three important elements that make the difference in what the defeat of Daesh there will mean: the forces which have taken the control of the city, its geographic conditions and the cumulative effect of the strategic military losses of the group.

It is Kurdish militias -supported by the US- who have taken control of Raqqa in the middle of a Syrian war with many more open battle fields, while in the Iraqi Mosul it was the government forces that recovered the territory with the aim of rebuilding the country, as RUSI’s UK counter-terrorism expert, Raffaello Pantucci, points out.

“They (the terrorists) are completeley surrounded, so there is an inevitability that the group will eventually loose the territory. The problem is in Syria you’ve got a different array of groups: from Syrian Defence Forces [opposing Bashar al-Assad] to Kurdish forces to Syrian Government forces… a lot of people who’re fighting against ISIS, non of whom really work with each other and some of them are even fighting against each other. So the real question is who’s gonna step in and fill the space to rebuild the city?”, he tells Salam Plan.

The security and defense senior analyst at the Spanish Elcano Royal Institute, Félix Arteaga, agrees with the diagnosis and adds an essential difference in the practical and military aspect for the future of Raqqa and Daesh: the city is much smaller than Mosul in terms of size and population. In the case of Mosul, it was initially said that the number of besieged people were one million, but then it turned out to be less, he recalls. In Raqqa, initially the estimated inhabitants were initially 60,000, but the current number has been reduced to between 2,000 and 3,000 inhabitants, taking into account those who fled and those who died.

“Raqqa is smaller than Mosul (…). It will take some time not only to recognize that it is controlled, but also that it is open, which is the important thing: to remove at least all the landmines in the main entrances (to the city) and check every single house out. That will take a lot less (than in Mosul),”says Arteaga to this website. “ISIS has already strategically lost the city, (although) there are always sympathizers who might come back. It’s a city where they had quite a number of supporters”. Pantucci also warns of the difficulty of completely eradicating the presence of the Daesh in the city: “At the end of the day, it’s quite a confusing battlefield: you’re dealing with urban warfare, there’s people there who are melting back into the population and you’ve got lots of groups fighting over it”.

ISIS has already strategically lost the city, (although) there are always sympathizers who might come back. It’s a city where they had quite a number of supporters.

Arteaga believes that Assad, who has the support of Russia, Iran and more and more of Turkey, will eventually take control of Raqqa. Pantucci explains that the Kurdish militias have no interest in ruling the city, because it is neither Kurdish nor those groups have governing experience. The Western forces are also not likely to be in charge of rebuilding the Raqqa, since they intervene in Syria only from the air or by supporting third parties such as the Kurds. “It remains a very dangerous site”, RUSI expert sums up.

At the same time, Daesh’s terrorists and their chiefs continue their retreat towards the south of the once-called “capital” of their self-proclaimed caliphate. They are settling near the Iraqi border in sparsely populated areas, where other actors in the Syrian war have no special interest. Arteaga explains there they still have access to some oil, but their main source of funding – the tax system imposed on the inhabitants of the areas they dominate – no longer gives the income they were used to.

“Their main source of funding – the tax system imposed on the inhabitants of the areas they dominate – no longer gives the income they were used to”

He recognizes that the control of territories once meant a “qualitative leap” for the terrorists and estimates that the actions Daesh has taken openly since 2014 in the region, now will have to go “underground, with low profile, (because) they are very marked in areas where they’ve lost material means, etc. Living at the expense of the population as they have done (until now) will be very complicated. ”

For this analyst, the loss of Raqqa hardly means changes for the Daesh when it comes to a practical point of view. In fact, he considers that the relevance of this defeat for the terrorist group would barely reach 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. “The importance is not the same now than what it would have meant a few years ago. It is already one loss after another (and) the organization is already in a dynamic to contain damages and restructure itself. They have known for some time that the fall of Raqqa is inevitable. They’ve been pulling troops to the southern border. Its loss has more a symbolic, moral meaning.” (Take a look at the map of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Syria Direct).

Pantucci agrees: “Losing the ‘capital’ in Syria is embarrassing and definitely a demonstration that you’re losing the territory. But it’s not the end of the group, (which) will continue to evolve in a new direction”. He reminds that the terrorist group “has been around since the late 1990’s. I think what we’re going to see now is them going back to be a much smaller organization, rather than a ‘state-controlled’ entity”.

Losing the ‘capital’ in Syria is embarrassing and definitely a demonstration that you’re losing the territory. What we’re going to see now is them going back to be a much smaller organization, rather than a ‘state-controlled’ entity

Meanwhile, in ISIS affiliated groups in Egypt are also trying to impose their radical vision of jihad through laws in some places, according to some reports. Their particular presence in Libya, Afghanistan or scattered throughout Africa and Europe is not to be ignored either.

Is there more danger of attacks on European soil and other parts of the world after taking over Raqqa? Neither Pantucci nor Arteaga believe so. “It is always possible, but even if they win, too. When they were winning (on the battlefield), people went there (to join them). Now [since some time ago] the diaspora has reversed and increased risk in all scenarios,” says the Elcano expert. “They have a real basic (battlefield knowledge) wherever they go, which comes from the experience in Syria,” he adds. But the RUSI analyst recalls that most of the attacks committed so far on European soil by Daesh or sympathisers were perpetrated by terrorists who had not moved to the territory then controlled by the self-styled “Islamic State” Prior to their attack.

The chief of MI5 has said in an interview with the BBC that there are 3,000 extremists in the United Kingdom; “a number of whom” are former foreign fighters who returned from Syria and Iraq*. It is an example of the situation accross several European countries. But this does not mean that each one of them is ready or willing to kill, according to MI5 and Pantucci as well.

The end of Raqqa is an important step in Daesh’s accumulation of military and moral defeats, but more and more the voices of experts and governments agree that reducing the fight against terrorism to a security and military issue would be a mistake.

*Correction: Initially this report said “about 700” of the extremists in UK are returnees, but that is the approximate number of more than 800 British foreign fighters who went to join ISIS in Syria or Iraq and remain alive. We apologize for any inconvenience this error might have cause the reader.

La entrada ISIS’ defeat in Raqqa stronghold is not as <br>game-changing as you might think se publicó primero en Salam Plan.