1. How's everyone's weekend going? Ready for Part 3? Based on the dozens of interviews we did with citizens of the caliphate, here's an uncomfortable truth: In terms of the services they provided, ISIS sometimes outperformed the governments they usurped: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
2. Under ISIS, Mosul was a city terrorized by killers. It was also a city and a region where the streets were cleaner than they had been under the Iraqi government. It took weeks on the ground to get residents to open up about this detail of ISIS rule. 
3. Let me be clear: No one is saying that they want ISIS back. In fact, the interviews on the services they provided were among the most difficult because no one wants to be perceived as saying something good about ISIS. It was typically in Hour 2 that residents opened up.
4. But we would be amiss to overlook this detail. We know the group was welcomed by one segment of the population in northern Iraq. Why? Considering how a terrorist group was able to fix some longstanding municipal grievances is part of the answer. Let me tell you what they did.
5. Households in the caliphate were taxed for garbage collection. The ISIS division that handled this was "Diwan al-Khadimat," their Ministry of Sanitation. In Iraq, families were taxed 2,000 IQD per residence (around $1.68 at today's rate). Here are the receipts they handed out
6. A different bill collector came by every month if you had a landline, like the shopkeeper named below who showed me his receipt from the ISIS' "Land Telecommunications" office. It cost another 5,000 IQD (under $5).
7. For electricity, residents were charged by the amper. I love the warning below: "In case of any manipulation of the circuit breaker .. a fine of 250,000 IQD will be levied on the abuser and the power will be cut off. The abuser will also ... be subject to Sharia sanctions.
8. Here's the surprising thing I learned about the services provided by ISIS: They were provided by the same electricians, the same street sweepers, the same garbage compressor drivers as before. Except now, they were managed by a terrorist group. Fear imbued their work life
9. In the northern Iraqi town of Tel Kaif, I sat down with the man who headed ISIS' electricity office. He was the same electrical engineer who'd spent his career working for the Iraqi government. I also caught up with the head of ISIS' local sanitation office. Same thing.
10. They described how during the time of Iraqi government rule, the most they could do to discipline a worker who was slacking off was give them a one-day suspension without pay. When ISIS took over, they simply sent the lazy employee to see their ISIS supervisors.
11. ISIS told the garbage collectors that *they* needed to make sure each house was serviced. Before ISIS, families described how the garbage compressor would zoom through their neighborhood and housewives would rush out with their trash. If they missed it, too bad
12. Under ISIS, residents said the same sanitation workers were now knocking on doors to make sure each house was serviced in certain neighborhoods of Mosul. "If anyone complained that their trash hadn't been picked up, we knew we'd be in trouble," one sanitation worker told me.
13. In one tiny village in the Iraqi district of Nimrud, a street sweeper told me that the ISIS sanitation supervisor had even imposed a trash quota: Laborers were told not to return until they had filled the bed of their pickup truck with trash. This presented a problem.
14. The village was nearly empty because families had fled. So the street sweeper described the solution he devised: He swung by an abandoned construction site every day and threw cinderblocks into the back of his pickup truck to top off his load in order to make quota.
15. The fear ISIS instilled in its workers is evident when you interview them. To most residents, it just seemed like the streets were cleaner. Even as they express relief at ISIS' defeat, they speak bitterly about how the government is once again failing to pick up the trash
16. Pls don't misunderstand this thread: Cleaner streets does not wash away the blood this group spilled. It's hard to find anyone who wishes for the group to return. But their ability to provide better services in in certain limited sectors is concerning, as @FawazGerges notes
17. I'll end with the story of Sara Muhammad, the eldest daughter of Muhammad Nasser Hamoud below, an agronomist who was forcibly conscripted into ISIS' work force. After ISIS' imposed the full face-covering veil, she made the mistake of stepping out without covering her eyes
18. The officer from ISIS' morality police, who spotted her, didn't even give her time to speak. He punched her with his closed fist in the eye. She nearly lost consciousness from the blow, and from then on, her father only allowed her outside the house to go to the doctor.
19. The blow caused her eye to swell, permanently damaging her vision. She now wears thick corrective glasses. Even through those glasses, she said she can see the growing pile of trash outside her house. "We have to be honest," says her father. "It was much cleaner under ISIS"
