Tikrit: Iraq’s Abandoned City Zaid Al-Ali The New York Review of Books May 4, 2015, 3:52 p.m. Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters Debris on a road in Tikrit, April 1, 2015 On June 11, 2014, Mahmoud, a sixty-year-old employee at a school in Tikrit, Iraq, drove home for his afternoon nap. Thirty minutes later, he received a frantic call from a friend in Baghdad who demanded to know if TV ..