On What We Remember, What We Forget, and Who Decides

From the ruins of Mosul to the silence of official memory, this essay explores how narratives of destruction and recovery are constructed, circulated, and selectively remembered in a globalized world.

Fata Al Iraq Newspaper, Mosu Public Library archives

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Some cities enter the world's consciousness only in crisis. Before that, they were geography. After that, they are metaphors. Mosul is such a city.

Located in northern Ira…