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I Documented ISIS’s Crimes. Then I Visited Auschwitz.
Omar Mohammed
October 27, 2026

On August 24, I landed in Warsaw at night. I have long held that a city reveals its identity after dark, so I took the 175 bus from the airport into the center to get a better sense of it. Something in that ride unsettled me. I have sat in my hometown of Mosul, Iraq, a city under ISIS occupation, and known exactly what I feared. On that bus, there was nothing I could point to, and yet my body reacted as if there were. I said afterward that I had smelled the ash of the dead—literally, still in the ground 80 years on. I had never been to Poland. I first learned of the Holocaust in Mosul, in 2004 or 2005, when satellite dishes became easy to get after the fall of Saddam Hussein. I watched documentaries on the Second World War, one after another, recording each of them—because in those years we still lived with the expectation that anything could disappear at any moment. READ MORE