Mosul Neighbors Enjoy a Day Without ISIS, but the Path to Peace Will Be Long

Tim Arango entered the city of Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday with Iraqi special forces soldiers.

For the first time in more than two years, residents of eastern Mosul enjoyed a day without the Islamic State. As Iraqi security forces drove the muddy streets of the neighborhood, families stepped from the gates of their driveways, waving, flashing two-fingered victory signs and yelling, “Heroes!” Others held white flags.

Some men, in ankle-length Arab gowns in the jihadist-regulation style, were smoking cigarettes, while others had them tucked behind their ears. They were celebrating the Iraqi forces’ victory over the Islamic State in their area by savoring some of the small pleasures banned under more than two years of militant rule.

“We are very, very happy,” said one man, Qais Hassan, 46, surrounded by soldiers. “Now we have our freedom.” The Islamic State, he said, had “asked us to implement religion. But they had nothing to do with religion.”

Iraqi soldiers were seeing firsthand what life in Mosul had been like under Islamic State rule imposed in 2014. But they were also catching a glimpse of some of the challenges ahead, simultaneously pressing the fight toward the city center and going about the messy business of re-establishing government authority.

Whether the mostly Shiite Iraqi military and police forces can keep the peace behind their front lines will largely depend on whether they can care for the displaced and root out Islamic State fighters, without exacting collective punishment on a Sunni Arab population that had largely welcomed the Islamic State fighters at first.

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