Raad al Jammas
Mosul’s Old City still lies in ruins three years after intense fighting drove out IS militants. With rebuilding unlikely and Iraq’s economy in tailspin, homeowners are desperate to sell.
But many who lived through the horrors of IS rule there are now unable to find buyers for their properties in what still resembles a warzone.
Piles of rubble block streets and collapsed buildings mar the shattered ancient city centre once famous for its mosques, churches and synagogues and maze of historic streets.
Entire neighbourhoods remain blanketed by a pungent stench which locals say is caused by still unrecovered bodies, broken sewage systems and illegal trash dumps.
Many family homes on the banks of the Tigris river have remained largely undamaged, but are still off limits because IS booby-trapped them.
“For months, I’ve been trying to sell my home in the Old City because it’s too damaged to live in,” said 62-year-old Saad Gergis. “But no one wants to buy it because it’s surrounded by homes emitting horrible smells.”
The IS group, which ran a self-declared “caliphate” across vast parts of Syria and Iraq, captured Mosul in 2014 but was driven out by the Iraqi army in mid-2017 after months of gruelling street fighting.
Many Mosul residents long waited for compensation or rebuilding — in vain, as Iraq remains mired in political and economic crisis. Gergis finally scraped together what he could and bought a plot of land outside the city to build a new home for his wife and four children.
Until the house is ready, his family is living in a rented apartment across town, on the eastern outskirts of Mosul.
Returning to his old neighbourhood is difficult for Gergis, who lived for three years under brutal IS rule.
“When I go back, I can see all the old horrors of IS: the killings, the explosions, the executions,” he said.
IS may have been defeated in Mosul, but Iraq is now struggling through its worst economic crisis in years, deepened by last year’s collapse of oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic.
The dinar currency has been devalued by 25 per cent. “I bought my home well before the war at 60 million Iraqi dinars,” around $50,000 at the time, Gergis said. “It’s not even worth a quarter of that now. It’s the same for all the houses of the Old City.”
Mosul real estate agent Maher al Naqib said property prices have collapsed across a devastated city which has seen little government help.
“The state has not paid for the damage, public services have not been restored, government buildings haven’t reopened and bridges have not been rebuilt,” he said.
— AFP
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