The Sabirin Mosque Prison

This prison was in the Sabirin Mosque in eastern Mosul’s Wahda neighborhood. The mosque was built in 1992 and became an important building in the neighborhood. After capturing Mosul in 2014, ISIS used the five rooms in the mosque complex as prison cells and as administrative rooms in which prisoners declared their ‘repentance’. One room was dedicated to issuing repentance cards, a second was for declarations of repentance, and a third was for the delivery of repentance religious lessons. The other two rooms were used as cells, and held Iraqi policemen and officers who did not meet the ISIS repentance criteria. The detainees faced charges including denying the possession of a weapon and failure to pay a fine for carrying a weapon. ISIS evacuated the mosque for security reasons in late 2015. After the expulsion of ISIS from Mosul, the mosque was restored and renamed the Abdul Qader al-Gilani Mosque. Even before ISIS, the Sabirin Mosque was a target of military operations due to its geographic location. In 2005, it was raided by American troops, who tampered with the mosque’s possessions, and closed it down for one and a half years. After that, the Nineveh police set up a surveillance point on the mosque roof. This made it a target of repeated attacks, including a car bomb that detonated nearby without damaging the mosque. However, the mosque’s dome was completely destroyed by a different explosion. The mosque was reconstructed in 2012 and reopened the following year, before falling into the hands of ISIS.