Mosul Lives

Young Iraqis and Moslawis, led by Bryar Bajalan, Yasameen Jawdat, and Tahany Saleh, approached Kashkul in 2016, as Coalition Forces battled the Islamic State for control of Mosul, with the idea for Mosul Lives: an oral history project staffed and directed entirely by emerging Iraqi oral historians who conducted extensive lifetime interviews with Moslawis from every echelon of society. Their intention in aggregating so many individual perspectives was to create a picture of daily life in Mosul, before the Islamic State, and before the American presence of 2003. They saw that reconstruction required remembering and imagination as well as bricks and mortar. Funded initially by the International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library hosts the original interviews. Kashkul will release Mosul Live, an album recorded on the streets and in the gardens of the city, in 2024.