To track down the books, he has had to travel 400 kilometres south to Baghdad, and even a further 600 kilometres to Basra.
MOSUL – Watheq Mahmud is pursuing an advanced engineering degree but the textbooks he needs are often missing in his native Mosul, the Iraqi city where jihadists burned volumes and destroyed libraries.
But when the Islamic State group seized the city in 2014, it banned any texts deemed un-Islamic and burned treasured archives. One of Mosul's most prominent literary hubs was the Central Library, erected in 1921 in the eastern Faysaliyah quarter. Those gems were all destroyed in February 2015, when IS fighters looted the Central Library and systematically destroyed other collections, despite howls of protest locally.
The library has received 11,758 volumes but is still missing more than a quarter of its previous content, said Hesso.
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