Six months after the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, its efforts to overhaul the school system reflect the limits of its progress toward building a self-governing caliphate on the land it controls in Iraq and Syria.
Although the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, presents itself as a liberating, governing force for the region’s Sunnis, it has largely failed to provide civilian services, instead focusing its limited manpower on social control.
The result has been a life of deprivation, fear and confusion for the city’s roughly one million remaining residents, according to interviews with 15 people, reached by phone inside Mosul, whose full identities have been withheld to prevent retribution.