June 10, 2024 11:02 AM

Iraq’s Mosul springs back to life 10 years after it fell to ISIS

It was the simple night-time act of watering flowers on his street in Mosul's Old City that made Saqr Zakaria stop and think about just how safe this last bastion of Islamic State militants had become since it was liberated in 2017. "I thought for a second, 'where am I?'" said Zakaria, who left the city in 2005 but returned to set up a cultural centre, the Baytna Foundation, in 2018 at a time when thousands of bodies were still being cleared from the ruins. The jihadist group declared its cali...