A mural featuring portraits including many women in Mosul, Iraq, including celebrities like Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande. The artwork is on a wall where ISIS used to list its extremely strict rules, including that women’s faces had to be covered, and the punishment for breaking them.
Jason Beaubien/NPR
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Jason Beaubien/NPR
MOSUL, Iraq — After ISIS took over this northern Iraqi city in 2014, women weren’t allowed to show their faces in public. They had to wear black veils with just slits for their eyes and long black robes. They could be whipped, and their husbands fined, if the women violated the dress code.
Now colorful murals are popping up all across Mosul on what had been bullet-strafed facades. And many of them are giant pictures of women’s faces.
This vibrant street art is a sign of the spirited rebuilding going on in Mosul, nearly five years after ISIS rule in the city and the fierce battles to oust it.
Twenty-year-old Rusul Ahmed painted two of the murals.
“It’s not something wrong when a woman shows her beauty,” she says.
The university student is standing in front of a 15-foot-tall mural of a woman with jet-black hair and a dramatic swish of eye shadow. In the portrait, the woman’s chin juts up slightly, exuding confidence, maybe even defiance.
“When ISIS came here, the women they had to cover her body, her face. That’s wrong because the women should be able to live their life,” Ahmed says.
Twenty-year-old Rusul Ahmed has painted several of the murals in…