NPR

Life After ISIS: One Sister Wants To Rebuild. The Other Can't Wait To Leave

The Iraqi city of Mosul is now free from ISIS control. Two sisters who attend Mosul University talk about their goals for the future, and the obstacles that remain.
Sisters Raffal, left, and Farah Khaled are first-year students at Mosul University in Iraq. They're standing outside the university library, which was burned down, along with most of its books, by ISIS when it controlled the city.

Farah Khaled stands in front of the scorched and twisted steel beams of the destroyed Mosul University library. Red and green ribbons stand out against the blackened metal — remnants of a book drive Khaled and other students organized.

"Their aim was to destroy our culture," Khaled, 22, says about ISIS. "To destroy every ancient thing, every beautiful thing."

But they didn't destroy Khaled, who is irrepressible.

She and her sister, Raffal Khaled, 19, are both in their freshman year at Mosul University. Like many of the students, Farah is three years

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