A simple Google search on ‘Mosul’, a city in northern Iraq of 1.6m people, will most likely return plenty of pictures of destruction. However, when you add the word ‘space’ to the search term, you will find images of young people working on their future and the future of their city. This community of young people is Mosul Space, a maker space founded by Salih Mahmod and whose story is full of courage, perseverance and hope.
The story of Mosul Space goes back many years. In his days as a student – while studying electrical and communication engineering – Mahmod got fed up with the style of teaching at his university. “The education in some Iraqi universities is hopeless,” he explains. Eager to learn, he got the idea to start a club of like-minded people, so that they could buy electronics together, such as microcontrollers, sensors and actuators, and learn by…
