Mosul liberated

July 9, 2017

After nine grueling months of street-by-street fighting that left the old city in ruins, Iraqi forces declared victory over the Islamic State in Mosul. The Grand al-Nuri mosque, where Baghdadi had announced his caliphate three years earlier, lay in rubble that his own fighters had detonated. Ten thousand civilians were dead. The caliphate's Iraqi capital had ceased to exist.