I Couldn’t Write About Mosul: Memory Is Not a Moment

Eleven years on, the city’s collapse continues to live inside those who survived it—wordless, embodied, unresolved.

Mosul did not simply fall in June 2014. It collapsed into memory—violent, disorienting, unfinished. And now, eleven years later, that memory has not faded. It has taken root, quietly and overwhelmingly, in the body.

For the past ten days, I tried to write something. Anything. But I couldn’t. My mind circled the memory without finding a way through. My bo…