The Return ticket from ISIS hell .. The story of an Iraqi fled from Mosul

The Militant organization, which swept through the city in the summer of 2014, prohibits any person to go out of the city. Urban population are a precious catch for ISIS, They are an important source of taxes, can also be used as human shields in the attempts to storm a city or in shelling.

Paying money to escape

In spite of that the organization granted temporary licenses for patients to leave the city at first, but it became a refrain about it after the escape of a number of civilians.

Faced with this situation , now the city's population no longer have anything in front of them but to contact smugglers and pay large sums of money to escape from the hell of ISIS.

A taxi driver in Mosul, tells "The Independent" British newspaper fleeing from the city, details after it has became impossible to live under the laws of ISIS.

One of the people of Mosul city, who declined to be identify himself for fear on his family, said he is fed up with the practices of the organization, adding: "The sanctions has become a daily basis. homosexuals are thrown from the roofs of buildings. The hands of accused thieves are cut off and  adulterers stoned. Smokers are lashed..

The economic situation in the city has deteriorated rapidly, after the Iraqi government stopped paying salaries , who were forced to continue to work without salaries in exchange.

Since the central government stopped paying state employees in Mosul this year, one of the few sources of income for civilians has dried up. Teachers and doctors who remain are forced to keep working without pay. Jobs are hard to come by, and prices for basic goods have risen. Meanwhile, Isis’s rule has become steadily more oppressive.

Food prices have increased and their presence has become a rarity in the market.

Escape From Hell

The former taxi driver said he had wanted to leave Mosul earlier but stayed to look after a sick relative. He then heard that a friend of a friend had a relative in Isis who was taking money on the side to get people out. He paid just under $1,000 (£645), putting himself in the hands of a chain of smugglers, with little idea of where he would be taken. As a member of Isis, his smuggler could easily navigate checkpoints. A group of about 11 were smuggled to Turkey, through Raqqa, the Isis stronghold in Syria.

“We didn’t know where we were. It was my first time outside of Iraq,” he said.

But traversing neighbouring Syria is one of the few ways out of the Iraqi city. Earlier in the summer, one of the man’s relatives left by road to Baghdad through Iraq’s western province of Anbar, but that route involves crossing active front lines,.

After leaving Raqqa, the former taxi driver was passed on to a new set of smugglers to be taken across the border into Turkey, by which time the group being smuggled had swelled to 50. The first time they tried to cross into Turkey, authorities at the border turned them back.

The second time, walking in the footsteps of their smuggler through a minefield, they made it, the journey having taken eight days. The taxi driver then travelled to Ankara, the Turkish capital, to turn himself in at the Iraqi consulate. Then he waited more than a month to receive a travel document to be able to board a flight back into Iraq. 

When he finally arrived in Baghdad in late September, he was immediately arrested, detained for eight days and charged with leaving the country illegally, before being bailed. “To get to my homeland after all that and be arrested,” he said. “It’s like they don’t see us as Iraqi.”