IT WAS a story I spent a great deal of time covering in 2017.

Indeed, the battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from the rule of the Islamic State (IS) group will stay with me long after this year draws to its end.

Those sights, sounds and smells from what many now recognise as the deadliest urban combat since the Second World War, will not easily be erased from my mind’s eye. Above all it will be the civilians caught up in the carnage that I will remember most.

People like the family I met two days into a journey to escape the city. They were sitting in the shade of a ramshackle tarpaulin tent strewn with litter and other filth in oven like heat. Their youngest child was a two-year-old girl called Farha, which in Arabic mean “happy occasion” or “joyous time” but there was only worry ahead for this family.

What must it be like to be uprooted, forced to walk away with nothing to an uncertain future? Across the world in 2017 whether in flimsy rubber boats off the Libyan coast or crossing the Myanmar-Bangladesh border under monsoon downpours, so many families have been forced to run from persecution and violence.

Just a few months ago after Mosul was retaken, I also met Zaman a petite twenty-eight-year-old woman at a clinic in the city where she was receiving treatment.

Severe depression and post-traumatic stress have gripped Zaman’s life ever since the loss of all four of her brothers at the hands of IS gunmen.

Anywhere between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians are now estimated to have been killed in the vicious street-to-street struggle to retake Mosul, a figure nearly ten times higher than has been previously reported by officials.

If Mosul was the stronghold where IS made one of its last stands in 2017, it was much earlier in the year in the city of Istanbul that they brought the year to a jolting start. No sooner had the New Year been welcomed in, than a gunman shot and killed scores of revellers at the Reina nightclub in the city.

Istanbul’s streets that night were packed with ambulances and other emergency service vehicles. It was a scene that was to be tragically repeated elsewhere around the world from Kabul to Barcelona, Paris to Mogadishu as the year progressed.

Indeed January set the tone for many of the themes that would dominate world news stories and headlines in 2017.

No theme more so than what followed the inauguration on a damp afternoon in Washington, of Donald John Trump as the 45th President of the United States.

Mr Trump was to be a US president the likes of which his country - or indeed the world - has ever seen before.

In the months that followed true to his presidential campaigning style, the new US leader would stick by his unerring ability to create division and outrage through a mixture of bluster and bullying, usually via Twitter.

In the days that followed Mr Trump’s inauguration, the slow motion calamity of the Trump presidency rapidly moved up a gear. Whether he was threatening a nuclear conflict with North Korea one day, or sacking the head of the FBI over “the Russia thing,” the next, there was never time to get complacent when it came to Mr Trump.

No sooner had he signed an executive order restricting people from seven Muslim majority countries, than millions of women took to the streets around the world to make it clear that women would not sit back and watch Trump’s belligerent, sexist, misogynistic style become the new normal.

In the United States itself the women's march became the largest single day street demonstration in the country’s history. In some ways too it was a harbinger of things to come, as women following the Harvey Weinstein scandal and allegations increasingly came forward with their accounts of being victims of pervasive sexual harassment. Some of those who did so and were dubbed “The Silence Breakers,” featured on the cover of Time magazine’s 2017 Person of the Year.

Just as here in Britain where Brexit was the all-pervasive backdrop to our politics, so Trump’s presidency became so for Americans.

Many of them suddenly seemed to have discovered that political apathy is a luxury better left to people living in countries where they trust their government.

The true nature of the Trump presidency was again summed up by his reaction to the summer turmoil in Charlottesville, Virginia following a racist rally on the streets of the city.

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now,” insisted Mr Trump, unwilling to single out the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who paraded their bigotry on the streets.

Almost daily throughout 2017 Americans must have felt that they were waking up to another low point in their country. This not least in October, when the country’s enduring and perverse obsession with guns allowed 64-year-old Stephen Paddock to mow down 58 country music fans at a concert in Las Vegas.

Further afield other threats from weapons obsessed figures kept Mr Trump on his toes and made for some alarming Twitter responses. Top amongst them was a certain North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Kim’s apparent ecstasy following his military’s successful test firing of a ballistic missile, was matched only by what state media called street “dancing parties” and “great joy and excitement.”

Elsewhere times were bit harder for long time despots. After almost four decades as president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s reign ended shortly after tanks rolled into Harare in November to force him from power.

The trigger was Mugabe’s decision to shove aside his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa in favour of his wife, Grace.

Disgruntlement and disillusionment with other political leaders too was widespread.

In Myanmar tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fled atrocities committed by the Myanmar military, while one-time darling of the human rights community, Aung San Suu Kyi remained inexplicably silent.

There was anything but silence however last May as more than 200,000 Venezuelans gathered in Caracas to show their discontent with President Nicolas Maduro, as the country struggled with dire food shortages.

Some world leaders of course have had a great 2017. Not even Adele with her five Grammy awards has had as good a year as China’s headman Xi Jinping, who with his

“Extraordinary Elevation” and “Xi Jingping Thought” being written into the Communist Party’s constitution secured his place in the pantheon of Chinese greats in 2017.

If Xi has long been one to watch then focus too on a certain young man in a hurry, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS to his friends. These days MBS counts among his friends Mr Trump, his son -in-law Jared Kushner and surprise, surprise, increasingly in 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. They all had one thing in common last year, a fear and loathing of Iran, but that is a story to be played out next year.

Indeed as 2017 closes much of what happened in the last twelve turbulent months still has a long way to run. Just days before Christmas, many Spaniards sat glued to their televisions to find out how they had fared in the annual Christmas lottery, El Gordo one of the world’s biggest. As the year draws to an end the future of Catalonia’s hopes for independence resembles a bit of a lottery too after an election that set Madrid and Barcelona up for a political war of attrition in the months ahead.

Bad blood too will continue between Washington and the United Nations after the world body showed the temerity to vote in favour of a draft UN resolution against Mr Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

And 2017 was another low in terms of relations between Washington and Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin outwitting many on the world stage and consolidating his power base at home.

Looking back on 2017 and especially my time spent in Iraq and Mosul, I have no doubt that the Middle East holds yet more nightmares in store that will impact way beyond the region.

Yemen’s ‘forgotten war’ and Syria’s seemingly endless one, are both far from over and as in 2017 are increasingly fought out against the wider backdrop of the Shia -Sunni struggle.

For perfectly understandable reasons many of my colleagues have dubbed me the ‘international man of misery.’ But I can assure readers that far from being an accurate epithet, it just happens to go with the territory. I mean, let’s look on the bright side, we’re already one full year into Donald Trump’s presidency. Happy New Year wherever you might be.