Two days later we visited a school in East Mosul, and met with several teachers who, until a couple months ago, were forced to teach school the ISIS way. They echoed Mr. Mohammed's estimate: "[During ISIS's reign] this school had only 50-60 students. Now we have 700." Seriously, imagine going to a school with so few students, a single basketball team (including bench players) would take up a quarter of the population.
I also sat down with 11-year-old Abdulrahman, who prefers to go by the nickname "Abood." Which, honestly, even if he protested, I was going to call him that anyway.
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
The kid is pretty damn awesome.
He spent almost two semesters as a student while ISIS ran his city, and he told us about the first day the mujahedeen (ISIS's fighters) came to speak to his class: "They wore Afghan clothes, like a long dress with a pistol around their waistband and bullets on their chest, an AK-47 on their back. Their beards were long, their hair was long." They mostly talked about killing people, which I'll cover in more detail, shortly. As a general rule though, Abood saw the ISIS guys more often outside of class than in it. "When they did the call for prayer they had a vehicle and would patrol, if they found someone not attending prayers they would hurt them."
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
ISIS
ISIS
Google
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
ISIS
ISIS
ISIS
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
Magenta Vaughn (Click Image For Full Size)
241 Comments