Extremist-Ruled Mosul: Why Some Iraqis Are Returning

Luqman decided to flee his hometown of Mosul after he heard of the new rules for local residents published by the militants who took the city from the Iraqi government on June 9. According to the oil company accountant, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had banned alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, instructed women to go out only if necessary and only while veiled, and pledged to punish thieves by amputating their hands. Luqman, who declined to be identified by his last name, had a more pressing reason to escape the city’s new rulers: He is a Shiite, a member of a religious sect that the Sunni extremists consider apostate. “As long as Da’ash are in Mosul,” he says, using the group’s abbreviated Arabic name, “I cannot come back.”

On Saturday, about 20 miles east of Mosul, Luqman’s car was one of a mass of vehicles waiting to be waved into Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, the wealthy, semiautonomous enclave that has so far avoided the violence of Iraq’s accelerating implosion. A Kurdish fighter manning the checkpoint says that at the beginning last week the road had been backed up for several miles, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Mosul after its lightning-quick capture by ISIS. The flood of refugees, he says, has since slowed considerably.