From the roof of his house, Ali Hassan, a 30-year-old Sunni history professor, points to Samarra’s famed al-Askari mosque, one of the most revered Shiite sites in Iraq. Sunlight glints off the shrine’s golden dome, casting rays towards another side of Samarra — a downtrodden district behind gray blast walls that have split the city for the past 15 years.

“The wall has become our Berlin Wall,” says Hassan, shaking his head. “It was built to protect the mosque after it became a flashpoint for sectarian slaughter. But it has separated the town for years. Now it’s time to go back to normal.”

For much of the two decades since the ousting of Saddam Hussein, Samarra has been a divided city. The sacred mosque — the third-most important site for Shias in Iraq — stands in resolute splendor near the center, surrounded by restless streets that, not long ago, were the epicenter of the country’s brutal civil war.

In February 2006, and again in June 2007, al-Qa’ida detonated bombs at al-Askari, igniting the worst bloodshed of the chaotic years that followed the US invasion. Calls for restraint from Shia clerics Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr went unheeded, and Iraq was plunged into years of savagery.