Sayf Al Ashqar.
a loved one at their hands. Sayf says: “ISIS is a terrorist group that robbed people’s will, using false beliefs. Raped, killed, burned and destroyed society. In a difficult time, there was no one to support us, and we did not know that they would control the city so easily from 2014 to 2017 through their possession of weapons and the terrorist organisation. “The terrorists killed my father, who was an academic, and destroyed my family’s house, destroyed the university and burned the library.”
Despite the horrendous oppression and violence, some library staff did
Rebuilding stock with contributions from Book Aid UK.
what they could to save the collection, as Sayf recalls: “Librarians and staff tried to prevent terrorists from stealing and burn- ing books and resources, but the terrorists had weapons and were insulting everyone. Some content was saved by taking risks.” ISIS waged violence against people, attacking institutions and those connected to them. Sayf, like hundreds of thousands of others from Mosul, was lucky enough to find a route out of the city. He says: “When ISIS took control of Mosul, with difficulty I left Mosul for the city of Dohuk in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. As a civilian, I must use my intellectual and scientific knowledge to fight terrorism.” To that end, “alternative locations were established for the University of Mosul, and I was working on a daily basis in the main alternative location of the university to provide services and to clarify our difficult situation to obtain support to fight terrorism.” It is not hard to understand why Sayf wanted to carry on providing services, despite the fact that “life was very difficult”, when he explains why he wanted to become a librarian in the first place. He says he was inspired to join the profession by “knowl- edge, relationship, hope, learning, experi- ence, sharing and understanding”. In the same year as ISIS entered Mosul, the university library was able to deliver services from its temporary home. “University of Mosul began providing its services by opening an alternative location in the Kurdistan region of Iraq during a short period of ISIS occupation of the city of Mosul in 2014,” Sayf explains. “To ensure continu- ity in the same year, the library restored its services through the alternative location.”
26 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
ISIS continued to hold Mosul until 2017, and in July of that year Iraqi troops declared victory following eight months of fighting to regain control of the city. Sayf says that this moment marked the start of the library’s return to the city, although it would take many years before that dream came to fruition. Library staff continued to work at the temporary home in Kurdistan, but at the same time prepara- tion for a return to Mosul were under way. Staff and students returned to the uni- versity, but more than one million items had been lost or damaged during the occupation. While library staff had done their best to save some of the collection, it was an impossible task to save them all. Following the liberation of the city, the university library did its best to support students and academics, but without the resources it has not been easy. A campaign, the Mosul Book Bridge,
(
https://mosulbookbridge.org), was established to help restore some of the lost books. It brought together academics from Mosul and the UK who set about finding ways to rebuild stock. Book Aid UK also joined the campaign, helping to coordinate the donations of thousands of books and other resources back on the shelves. Dr Alaa Hamdon, a lecturer at the Uni- versity of Mosul, was the founding force behind the campaign and he was joined by Dr Caroline Sandes (International Council on Monuments and Sites, UK); Dr Alice König (Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of St Andrews, UK) and Kate Walker (Education Consultant and PhD Candidate, University of Sheffield, UK). Over a five-year period, some 50,000 core
April-May 2022
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