This used to be a city.
Shops.
Homes.
This used to be Western Mosul......
The rubble is strewn with decaying bodies and unexploded bombs.
Zarah Abdul Quader lived through the fighting.
She and her family spent weeks under siege in their home - directly opposite the famous
Al Nouri mosque.
That's where IS fighters hid from the international coalition.
The coalition bombed the city around her.
Nothing and no-one was spared.
There was death and bombs and explosions everywhere.
It simply didn't stop.
It was awful.
They fled, but with nowhere else to stay, they soon had to return.
Back to their ruined neighbourhood, to the two rooms of their house which were still
intact.
Now they rarely venture out - fear of the munitions scattered all around them keeps
the family at home.
There are still loads of shells lying around.
The house opposite was destroyed and they found something there.
A mortar grenade or something - and it hadn't gone off yet.
Explosives expert Mark Warburton has been in many crisis regions - but he says Mosul
is something new.
They've found many bombs, grenades, mortars - and thousands of explosive booby traps that
IS left on their retreat.
They've been very well built but on an industrial scale.
It's not sort of just getting a few people to building them here and there.
This has been sort of an industry too, to build them to this scale and this amount.
This was Al Shifa hospital.
It was a modern clinic.
Until the IS turned it into their headquarters.
The search and clearance team work through it by hand, piece for piece, metre for metre.
The UN Mine Action Service has 60 people in Mosul.
It's nowhere near enough The IS hid explosives so well that if you're
not extremely careful, you don't see them.
If someone goes in somewhere where we haven't been yet, and doesn't look out very carefully,
they can get blown up.
As more people return, it becomes more urgent to clear the deadly explosives still hidden
in the debris - or at least to mark which areas are safe.
But none of this is happening fast enough - the remnants of the bitter fight for Mosul
are all over the place.
Because this area was ISIS's final stand.
What we have found here is a lot of suicide belts.
This has been without a doubt the sort of main threat here.
This is what he's talking about.
A suicide belt among the rubble.
Atmo: If you move round the corner, if you take everyone that way around the corner ?
We move out of the danger zone in case it blows up.
It's soon cleared...
The belt had been packed with metal ball bearings to maximize damage.
You can clear a street one day but then we're going to back the next day because people
find things in their houses.
They shouldn't move them.
They do, and then we have to re-clear them.
The UN estimates that the clean-up of Western Mosul will take a decade.
But the residents don’t want to wait that long - they are eager to return to their homes.
But every shovel of rubble risks setting off a booby trap.
Rebuilding their homes is fraught with hidden danger.
Zahrah says she's happy that people are coming back to Western Mosul.
She hopes that each returning family will increase the pressure on the international
community to help them rebuild
the city.