With the rest of his family crammed into his battered silver Sedan car, ready to drive to Mosul, Maher, the teacher, described the city, which he had been to the day before.
“The situation is quiet and normal now in Mosul. Schools and hospitals have opened,” he said. “There is no pressure from ISIS. Yesterday there was a parade by them in the streets to show off the weapons that they took from the Iraqi army. People came out to watch; they feel safe.”
Video footage from inside the city shows masked gunmen acting as traffic police, calmly waving cars through at a crossroads. Other images show the jihadists studiously repairing broken electricity lines.
One female resident, who asked not to be named, spoke to the Telegraph from her home inside the city.
“The armed men organise even the municipal services. Rubbish is being cleaned off the streets. Electricity is very fine: we now have it more than nine hours per day, which is even better than during Saddam [Hussein]’s rule,” she said.
“Now, in these days of being in the grip of the armed men, we only feel the wonderful peace, which we have missed for more than a decade now, since 2003.”
All the residents in Mosul who the Telegraph spoke with automatically referred to the Iraqi army as the “Maliki militia”.
