Isis, Tomorrow. The Lost Souls of Mosul

Isis has lost Mosul. But has ISIS been defeated? Or does real war for those who have endured it and those who survive begin the day after a proclaimed victory?

This film stems from the questions which became more and more insistent every day of the months of fighting in Mosul and which accompanied us in the strenuous phases of the post-war period: what is necessary to do to save the hundreds of thousands of children raised for three years under Isis? How can we prevent these children from being the breeding ground for tomorrow's terrorism?

In ISIS, Tomorrow, the Lost Souls of Mosul, co-directors Francesca Mannocchi and Alessio Romenzi interview children, teenagers and mothers in the Iraqi city of Mosul about the three-year occupation of the city by fundamentalists ISIS, and how the liberation of the city in July 2017 has affected them.

Official synopsis:

In wars it is not uncommon for the defeated to bury their weapons before retreating, hiding arsenals waiting for better times. The weapons that Isis has left in inheritance for the future are hundreds of thousands of children educated in violence and martyrdom. In Isis’s ideology children are the most effective weapon to bring into the future the idea of a great universal Caliphate: successors of one goal, creating a world divided in half, on the one the Jihadists and on the other the infidels to be exterminated. 500 thousand minors lived in Mosul alone, during the three-year occupation of the Islamic State. Isis, Tomorrow traces the months of war through the voices of the children of militiamen trained to become suicide bombers, but also of their victims and those who fought them. Today, fighters’ descendants are children who bear the burden of having been educated to kill their neighbors and to make the ideology survive so that it can be reborn from the ashes of the fathers. Isis, Tomorrow follows the destiny of the surviving families of the fighters in the complexity of the post-war period, a post-war time of marginalization and stigma, in which battle blood leaves room for daily revenge and retaliation, for violence as the only response to violence.