The battle for Mosul may be over but the media war has just begun in the former Daesh stronghold in Iraq.
Iraq’s second largest city is where the terror group declared its self-styled Caliphate three years ago and where Baghdad declared its end in June.
Thousands fled the city during the eight-month battle — among them journalists caught in the middle of the world’s most dangerous story.
Now some are returning home, even though dangers remain as the executions of Daesh are replaced by revenge killings by the groups jostling for power and seeking to use the media to help attain it.
“Winning the war against Daesh will not be as hard as winning the peace,” said veteran journalist Osama Al-Habahbeh, the Iraq program manager at Denmark-based International Media Support (IMS).
He sees the potential for more killing as those accused of helping Daesh in the city themselves become targeted as collaborators.
A new online media platform in Mosul that is being established with the help of IMS aims to counter that by rebuilding trust between former belligerents and helping journalists drawn from different ethnic groups to work with each other.
“We created a network of more than 30 journalists from Mosul — Muslims, Christians, Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Kaka’i, Yazidi — all religions and ethnic groupings in the city.
“The media and political landscape in Mosul post-Daesh is more complex and messy. There are so many stakeholders who claim the right to control the city.
“You have the Shiites, the Sunni, the Kurds and Turkmen. Everyone wants Mosul to be under their control and all of them have their own media empires who moved into Mosul immediately after the liberation of the city.”
In an article published by IMS in May as the battle for Mosul was underway, Fryal Alyasi, a journalist in the city from the Yazidi community, describes how the experience of one of her family members during the Daesh occupation offered important lessons for those intent on revenge following the city’s liberation.
“My female cousin was one of the slaves taken by IS (Daesh) terrorists. However, after weeks of attempting to flee on her own, a Sunni family helped her and she was able to leave Mosul. This story proves that not all Sunnis are IS supporters, but rather supporters of decency and humanity. This story needs to be told,” she said.
Some 900,000 people have been displaced from the city since 2014 — about half the the pre-war population according to aid organizations.
Following the liberation of Mosul from Daesh in July 2017, IMS has helped to set up a network of 30 journalists from the city, who are working to rebuild social cohesion in the fragmented city through broad and balanced media coverage and act as a counter weight to radicalization.
The group have since developed the Mosul Media Platform to help turn that into reality — and even visited Sarajevo to hear how Bosnian journalists went through a very similar process more than 20 years ago following the end of the Bosnia war.
Al-Habahbeh sees rebuilding the city’s media as a very long term project. Reaching the city’s youth and women are an important part of that process he believes.
“The latest surveys of the Iraqi media users shows 65 percent of them use social platforms to receive information — not the traditional platforms like newspapers or television — so that too is our access point.”

Source:Arabnews