In July 2017 the whole world kept their breath when watching the broadcasts about the battle over Mosul, Iraq. It was a huge military operation to recapture Iraq's second largest city from the Islamic State (IS).  Mosul fell to IS in June 2014, with the terror organization proclaiming the creation of a "caliphate", and destroyed the city’s great mosque. In the following years most of the population of the city fled, while the terrorist and the fights basically destroyed the once blooming city into ruins. According to the BBC reports at that time, ‘thousands of Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes and military advisers, took part in the recapturing offensive’, which ended at July 10, 2017.

According to a summary by UN-Habitat and UNESCO “several months of armed conflict in the struggle to retake the city has left behind a devastated urban landscape, characterised by destroyed monuments, demolished houses, damaged buildings, destroyed infrastructure, extensive piles of rubble. Along the Tigris River, the historic urban fabric has been severely affected, with an estimated 5,000 buildings in the Old City destroyed or severely damaged.” A multi-disciplinary team from UN-Habitat and UNESCO has developed an Initial Planning Framework for the Reconstruction of Mosul in order to support Mosul’s local government with the reconstruction and recovery of the city.

The two parts of the city were connected by 8 bridges, most of them destroyed, so an important part of the Initial Planning Framework was the rebuild them in order to revitalize economy and trade in the city by reinstating regional infrastructural connectivity, and attract the citizens (including 15,000 families in refugee camps) back. As part of the rehabilitation of damaged bridges over the River Tigris in Mosul, Shuhada Bridge being 40% damaged and out of operation was also included in the Initial Planning Framework.

After the bridge has been rebuilt, the lighting system also had to be redesigned to provide an energy efficient solution using LED fixtures instead of the existing HID Sodium 400W fixtures. Tungsram, through its partner, plays part in the lighting solution over the bridge.