A Slow and Painful Recovery in Two Cities Once Controlled by ISIS

Residents make their way among destroyed buildings in Raqqa, Syria, Sunday, November 12, 2018. More than a year after the end of the brutal fighting that liberated the one time capital city of the Islamic State, and a devastating air campaign that mostly flattened it, Raqqa lies in ruins. © Victor J. Blue. From Cities in Dust, an exhibition by Victor J. Blue at the Bronx Documentary Center through April 21, 2019.

The Jamhuriya bridge over the Tigris River sits destroyed in Mosul, Iraq, Sunday November 4, 2018. Mosul has faced a slow and painful path back to normalcy after the brutal fighting that liberated the city from ISIS. © Victor J. Blue

A woman walks by a destroyed block in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Thursday, November 8, 2018. More than a year after the brutal fighting that liberated the city ended, and a devastating air campaign that mostly flattened it, the Old City in West Mosul lies in ruins. Few residents have returned and there is little commercial activity other than the destruction of devastated buildings and scavenging for metal. © Victor J. Blue

Residents make their way among destroyed buildings in Raqqa, Syria, Monday, November 12, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

Weeds grow among destroyed buildings in Raqqa, Syria, Sunday, November 11, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

Laborers work to pull rebar from a destroyed building being demolished in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Thursday, November 8, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

A patrol of Iraqi militia, the Hash del Shabi, drives through the Maidan, the riverfront district of the Old City, now completely destroyed in Mosul, Iraq, Tuesday November 6, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

Devastation surrounds the Al Nouri Mosque, famous as the site where ISIS declared it's caliphate, in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Monday November 5, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

An apartment block lies half destroyed in Raqqa, Syria, Sunday, November 11, 2018. © Victor J. Blue

Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, were leveled in the fight for liberation from the Islamic State. More than a year after the relentless bombing ceased and the ISIS militants were driven out, Raqqa and the Old City of Mosul remain in ruins. Victor J. Blue’s panoramic photographs, on view at the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) through April 21, capture the destruction of the cities’ buildings, which a short time ago were homes, hospitals, schools, places of worship, stores, and banks. For the most part, the roads that connected them are gone too. The glaring details of the emotional devastation that accompany Blue’s landscapes are left to take root in the viewer’s mind.

According to Airwars, over the course of the four-year campaign against the Islamic State, the US-led coalition conducted 14,638 airstrikes in Iraq and 16,864 airstrikes in Syria, the bulk of which fell on Mosul and Raqqa, the twin capitals of the ISIS caliphate. No comprehensive reconstruction plan exists; the viability of both cities remains in doubt.

Blue’s photographs ask: what is the cost of the West’s war against extremism if the battlegrounds remain permanently uninhabitable?

“Life in Raqqa and Mosul is frozen at a moment just after the last bombs fell, the fires went out, and the US-led coalition declared victory and moved on,” writes the BDC in a statement. “The civilians of Mosul and Raqqa are left to consider the scale of the destruction, and the reality that they have been forgotten.”

Cities in Dust
By Victor J. Blue
Curated by Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera
Bronx Documentary Center
Through April 21, 2019
Artist talk: Saturday, April 13 at 7pm