On a scorching August afternoon, an angry crowd besieged a mini-truck loaded with meat of two slaughtered cows amidst the ruins of what was the last ISIS bastion in Mosul. In a desperate scramble, they grabbed beef from a man standing in the open back of the truck and, after it pulled away, some stayed on to descend on the next one to arrive. Part of an annual ritual of Eid al-Adha celebrations, the deliveries did little to satisfy people living in the rubble of Mosul’s Old City more than a year after ISIS was ousted in a final battle reduced many inhabitants to homeless beggars, Reuters reported. Since Iraqi forces celebrated victory over ISIS, life for the inhabitants of ancient west Mosul has hardly improved. That has not left them happy with the government in Baghdad they long accused of treating them like second-class citizens. In early August, Hazem Mohammed, 52, and his family returned to a heap of debris that used to be his home next to a heavily damaged former football field, a few minutes’ walk from deserted ruins still reeking of unrecovered human remains. Mohammed settled down in a tent pitched outside his old house, affording his family a little shade in the 43 Celsius summer heat. On Thursday, his wife boiled water on an open fire outside the tent with small children playing inside. “I decided to live with my family in this tent to encourage the Iraqi government and humanitarian organizations to rebuild my house and other destroyed houses in the Old City,” he told Reuters. “We are a poor family. We don’t have money to live in dignity. We suffer from lack of food and we don’t have enough furniture because it is under the ruins of our house now.” A passing car stopped at the tent and the driver, who gave his name as Mohammed Saleh, handed out a bag of Eid meat. The reconstruction plan for Mosul and the whole of surrounding Nineveh governorate targeted 78 projects for 2017-2018 worth 75.5 billion Iraqi dinars (£49.2 million), supplemented by a 135-million-euro (£121.8 million) loan from Germany, according to ReFAATO figures published on Aug. 20. But experts say rebuilding Mosul alone - which had a pre-war population of 2 million and now has 646,000 homeless - is expected to cost billions of dollars.