The disappearance of urban areas is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today.
After it provided regional and global stability, enriched the sciences and the arts, and was a destination for those looking for safety for centuries, it is now turning into a source of instability and mass migrations that cause social imbalances in the country of origin and in the diaspora.
New population maps
Arab cities destroyed by wars are experiencing an alarming deterioration of security, and their original inhabitants are selling their homes and migrating to Turkey or European countries, leaving behind a population vacuum that is systematically filled by human masses coming from outside the region, even from outside its culture, which is the most dangerous.
The result is the emergence of new population maps and populations that are socially incoherent and culturally inconsistent, which extremist currents need to spread.
The population of the Euphrates Island region is approximately 15 million living in a situation of community collapse, after religious, ethnic and cultural pluralism was a feature of its societies hundreds of years ago, and monoculture has become its hallmark today, and it will not be long in the era of speed before social chaos reaches the rest of the region And to the most important remaining countries (Turkey), followed by Europe.
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This phenomenon occurs under the double influence of the rise of militias and the decline of the state.
The US occupation and the accompanying Iranian regional influence in 2003;
We ushered in a new era in the Middle East that enabled militias (populist forces of the uneducated) to take the place of the state, and at the same time enabled the presence of opposing militias (ISIS), and the hit-and-run wars between them caused the grinding of cities;
To be resolved in favor of militias that are practically an integral part of the government and its budget (the Popular Mobilization), and the result is that the metropolitan areas have lost the sense of belonging to a non-existent state, and the sense of citizenship has receded in the face of the official sectarian tide, and the younger generations have become victims of the national cultural vacuum and intellectual invasion.
open struggle
The conflict between the urban system and militias (or between the state and non-state forces) does not have a truce, cease-fire, or geographical borders, and it crawls like rust to the maximum possible point, and society has no choice but victory or demise, but the state that protects the urban system in normal circumstances does not exist Today, this turns the equation around and compensating the role of the state (through regional protection or internationalization) becomes the responsibility of the community, which is the core of the conflict. Without it, the societies of the region are transformed into human masses affiliated with external forces (Persia and the Romans);
Thus, the fall of the state and the destruction of urban areas is the opposite event to the Arab Islamic conquest, which established the state and established metropolitan areas.
The role of metropolitans in regional social engineering
Metropolises are not just cities;
Rather, they are social, cultural and economic centers whose influence extends outside their administrative borders and does not stop at the political borders. This characteristic represents a vital and very important factor in the Arab region, where small towns and rural areas (which constitute the largest area) are affected by the cultural and intellectual climate of the relatively few metropolises, so the metropolis provides a cover Culturally and socially “sajjaya” for the entire region.
This feature worked in the wake of the fall of the countries of the region - such as Iraq and Syria - and the destruction of their metropolises, with a large exodus towards the recovering metropolises in the north (Turkey), which is very similar to the destroyed southern Arab metropolis.
With this same characteristic, Mosul and Aleppo developed their common social and cultural character over the centuries as capitals of regional states on a wide area that withstood intellectual and military hurricanes, and overturned international equations, as in the Crusades.
The present is a cultural and social anchor that holds its surroundings, as does the marine anchor of a ship, to prevent it from escaping at sea. Today, there is not enough land left on the area extending between the shores of the Mediterranean and the eastern borders of Iraq of non-destructive cities to protect the ocean;
It was exposed and turned into soft cultural targets for extremist organizations and rules that soon took control of urban areas, as happened in Mosul, Aleppo, Homs and others.
Urban Reconstruction
Reconstructing metropolises that have been crushed by intellectual wars is more than restoring their stones to their original positions, a process involving experts from all fields wracked by destruction:
Society: and rid it of warlords
Economy: and its purification from mafias
Culture: Rewriting the curriculum
Heritage: linking the reconstruction of the old city to identity
Collective trust: psychological rehabilitation
Urban engineering: that culminates in all of this, so that the present can take off from the turbulence and carry out its mission, which is: bringing up generations and preserving the lifestyle, a task that is closely related to the place of the present and does not change even if it is flattened;
The destroyed metropolis is like a lifeless, dry land on which, if water descends, it shakes and grows from every joyful pair, because minerals are preserved in its soil. Today, it becomes a city in which “malls” and parks spring like fungi, and militias gnaw at each of its vital facilities.
Mosul is a regional capital and one of the most important metropolises of the Middle East, and its return as a full-fledged metropolis constitutes an antidote to extremism, a vaccine for future intellectual epidemics, a guarantee of social stability, a valve for regional and global security, and its cause is global.