In a classroom of the University of Mosul, in the Islamic State group’s former Iraqi capital, around 50 volunteers have undergone a week’s training on how to combat the militants’ ideology.
The ulema, or Islamic scholars, aim to set up ‘brigades’ tasked with ridding Mosul residents of extremist ideas following the city’s recapture last July which ended three years of Islamic State rule.
“Mosul must be liberated from the thinking of the Islamic State after having been liberated militarily,” said Mussaab Mahmud, who just completed the course, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
“We were deceived by Islamic State ideas and now we are trying to free ourselves from its ideology,” said the 30-year-old day labourer.
The first group of volunteers came from all sectors of Mosul society, including mechanics, teachers and a sheikh.
The men aged from 25 to 45 signed up on Facebook for the course run by the Ulema Forum of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city which was left shattered by the months-long battle to expel Islamic State.
The classes are being conducted by five teachers who are experts in Islamic jurisprudence from Mosul and Tikrit, a city to the south that was also previously under brutal Islamic State rule.
“The lessons are concentrated on human rights, human development, peaceful coexistence and communal peace,” the forum’s president Sheikh Saleh al-Obeidi told AFP.
He said participants were tutored on “faith, Islamic jurisprudence and the Hadith (record of the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad) to allow them to counter the ideas of Islamic State and its intellectual terrorism”.
