Isis, Tomorrow. The Lost Souls of Mosul

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 neighbours 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 marginalisation and stigma, in which battle blood leaves room for daily revenge and retaliation, for violence as the only response to violence.