Discussion with Historian & Author Omar Mohammed

Join the National Security & Civil Rights Program and its newest faculty memeber, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas, for a discussion of one man's response and resistence to the Islamic State. When ISIS overran Mosul in June 2014, Mosul was sealed off from the world. From a small room, Omar Mohammed, a young historian, created Mosul Eye. What began as a personal attempt to record the first days of the occupation became the only reliable source from inside the terror state. Every detail he wrote—checkpoints, executions, heritage destruction—was a risk. ISIS hunted him relentlessly, promising to kill him in a manner “humanity had not yet discovered.” Only years later would he discover that his reports, written by generator light to the sound of drones overhead, were being read not only by his neighbors and the world's newspapers—but by governments, analysts, and intelligence agencies, which relied on his work as one of the best inside sources produced during the occupation. Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS is the story of how a quiet scholar became the most elusive witness to one of the darkest chapters of the 21st century, and how knowledge, discipline, and truth outlasted a terror state.