BUZZFEED: This Manchester Student Crowdfunded To Rebuild Mosul's University Library

Description

Makram Alkhaled's daughter was just three months old when he left his home city of Mosul to take up a PhD scholarship at the University of Manchester. Nine months later, in June 2014, while he and his family were settling into the UK, ISIS militants took over the city, and his loved ones were forced to endure three years of their reign of terror.

The University of Mosul, where Alkhaled had studied as an undergraduate, was left in ruins after the ISIS occupation and a series of airstrikes in the lead-up to the city's liberation last July.

Now Alkhaled, 32, and his wife, who used to work as a teaching assistant at the University of Mosul's dentistry college, are planning to return home to their devastated city. Their eldest daughter, now 4, will be reunited with her family, and their youngest, aged 3, will see Iraq for the first time.

But before he leaves the UK, he has work to do. Next week he will ship around 1,000 books from the University of Manchester to Mosul, in an effort to restore the campus library into a space where he hopes his daughters can one day study.