“Mosul is very quiet. The people whom I met… are working to discover the identity of those armed forces, how long they are going to stay and what their intentions are.”So wrote a self-described “independent historian” within Mosul on June 17, 2014, one week after ISIS seized control. Rumors of a ban on smoking and mandatory Islamic dress for women circulated, the Al-Wihda church burned, and ISIS moved furniture into its new office in the former counterterrorism center, comparing their takeover to “the liberation of Mecca.” The “independent historian,” known as “Mosul Eye,” who previously covered Mosuli militants after the fall of Saddam Hussein, has faithfully chronicled the story of the occupied city online for over two years.

A U.S. Army Paladin supports the advance on Mosul.

As Iraqi troops press into the long-suffering city, Mosul Eye has continued his mission to document the situation on the ground. Having witnessed and decried coalition airstrikes on civilians, he has alerted advancing forces to the presence of civilians in certain buildings and areas. His posts provide valuable open-source intelligence, including booby-trap locations, militant movements, public attitudes, and long-form strategic analysis. Remarkably, despite the brutal warfare bleeding Iraq, life goes on in the strangely quiet Mosul amidst price spikes, airstrikes, and ISIS executions.

Mosul Eye has long dreaded detection by ISIS, which has repeatedly issued death threats against him and his family. Mosul Eye revealed that he plays dozens of different personas to avoid suspicion, including the “pious believer” and the “reckless fool.” As he noted on October 9, 2015, as the Iraqi military fought to take Ramadi, the true difficulty in his work is obtaining “accurate information while maintaining [his] safety and not revealing [his] identity.”

Some of his posts are almost lyrical. In a post dated November 1, he mused on the fear gripping him and the entire city. As ISIS prepared extensive tunnel networks to evade coalition airpower and launch ambushes, Mosul Eye wrote that “I feel… as if I am standing in the middle of a dark, endless tunnel, alone. But I hear something moving!... I know that escaping it is just utter[ly] insane because all routes in this maze of tunnels always lead back to this ‘thing’!”

The next day’s update hardly even mentioned the climactic battle fast approaching his city. “I will not write about fear tonight,” promised Mosul Eye, who instead reflected on his love for classical music and his dream of establishing an opera house: “...We lighten up the torch of life on the very land [ISIS] wanted [to turn] into the land of death…”

“May peace be upon Mosul,” ended the city’s anonymous diarist.