The horrific legacy. Iraq 10 years on from IS

A bright blue games console, identical to ones found in living rooms across Britain, sits on a table in northern Iraq. It looks innocuous – until you get closer. 

Sink taps, bags of rice and bottles of oil – all are items ISIS transformed into explosives to target innocent civilians or unsuspecting soldiers during their reign of terror in Iraq and Syria. 

A decade after their rise to power shocked the world, Molly Blackall of the I newspaper travelled to the former IS heartlands of northern Iraq to discover the inside story of their bloody occupation from those who lived through it. 

Off a dusty road in Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish city close to the border with Iran, is also a Mines Advisory Group (MAG) base which trains civilians to find and defuse explosives. 

Iraq is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, with decades of conflict leaving the land littered with unexploded devices. But here, the target wasn’t “military or strategic, it was there for everybody”.