THE massive effort to drive Islamic State from what had been Iraq’s second-largest city is now being matched by an enormous challenge to bring an ancient metropolis back to life from near total ruin.

Much of the historic Old City in western Mosul has been reduced to rubble, with corpses rotting on the streets or buried under debris.

Unexploded bombs and boobytraps litter the area, as IS guerrillas continue sniper attacks. Hundreds of thousands of former residents who fled remain trapped in limbo.

Rebuilding after the nine-month offensive that ended in July will take years and billions of dollars, but the priority now is to make the city safe enough for residents to return. That means hunting down IS stragglers, removing thousands of bodies and finding all the unexploded bombs.

“It’s very hard for us,” said Colonel Zacharia Ahmed Hassan, who heads a 19-man civil defence crew working up to 12 hours a day in 118F heat to recover bodies in western Mosul. “It’s very hot and we have to get up at 6.30am. But we have to do our jobs.”

Damage is far more extensive in western Mosul, where the fighting and air strikes were more fierce. In contrast, reconstruction in Mosul’s eastern half across the Tigris started in January. And a large proportion of buildings there remained intact.

Saeed al-Jayashi, a spokesman for the Iraqi military, said of eastern Mosul on a recent visit to Washington, DC: “Some facilities have been damaged but electricity, water and markets have all come back. Even university students were back at school, working on their dissertations.”

Col Hassan said his team works without body armour, making staff easy targets for any remaining IS sleeper cells.

Brigadier General Saad Maan said in a recent speech to the US defence department that IS fighters continued “to have attacks against civilians out of desperation” although they don’t hold any territory any more.

Being around so much death takes its toll. Col Hassan said his most difficult moment was recovering the bodies of five of his relatives from a collapsed building a month ago.

“It’s a bad memory,” he said. “The youngest two of them were medical students.”

Some of the remains recovered belong to IS fighters, but most of the bodies are civilians. The team points out that those killed deserve proper burial but the bodies also pose a public health risk through spreading potential disease if left on the ground.

Many civilians were shot in the streets by IS fighters while trying to flee although most were buried under buildings destroyed as a result of air strikes and other explosions, Col Hassan said.

More than a dozen civilians told how they lost relatives in air strikes by a US-led coalition that levelled buildings with scores of people inside. IS often used civilians as human shields during fighting.

With so many bodies buried under rubble, recovering them requires a great deal of work, but the civil defence team has few vehicles and only shovels and pick-axes.

Col Hassan said: “Many of the civil defence tools were destroyed in the occupation and the fighting. We don’t have the tools we need to help us with the bodies. They sent us a team from Baghdad and some trucks, but they are damaged.”

Some team members use their own lorries, and occasionally a private citizen will lend the crew a bulldozer.

The task is complicated by the presence of many anxious residents begging the team to help identify their loved ones. “People come to us all the time, shouting and crying,” Col Hassan said. “We understand them.”

In one day, the team can pick up 20 to 50 bodies, which are taken to hospital for identification. And while the work is grimly challenging, there are occasional pleasant surprises.

Col Hassan said: “Seven days ago, we found 23 people who were still alive. We pulled them from their graves under the rubble and took them to the hospital – men, women and children. They were very weak, hungry and sick, but alive.”

The job is dangerous in another way – no protection from the many bombs. When one is spotted, civil defence calls in the federal police’s emergency response division to dispose of it.

Most of the bombs are unexploded mortar and rocket-propelled grenades, as well as bombs – between 500lb and 2,000lb – that were dropped from planes, according to the civil defence and federal police. Only a fraction are improvised explosive devices or boobytraps set by IS.

Once the explosives are removed, they are handed over to the Iraqi army for safe disposal.

Colonel Taha Zebari of the emergency response division agreed: “The situation in Mosul is dangerous, especially on the west side.”

It’s hard to know how many explosives remain after five months of intense fighting in western Mosul.

Col Zebari said that, while his team had not suffered any losses from the bombs, the job was still difficult because of the lack of funds.

He said: “My team members are missing fuel and transportation.

“Only three members of the team are taking money from the government,” with the rest contributing money out of their pockets for equipment.