See Mosul’s Historic Leaning Minaret Tower, Rebuilt After Destruction by ISIS
Eight years after the Iraqi city was left in ruins, Mosul’s rich multicultural heritage is slowly but surely beginning to flower again
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As ISIS fled Mosul in 2017, the terrorist group left destruction in its wake. A leaning minaret that stood for 850 years was reduced to rubble. Church roofs collapsed inwards. Iraq’s pluralistic second city, whose very name means “linking point” or “junction” in Arabic, bore the deep scars of extremism and violence.
“ISIS was trying to destroy history itself, the record of preceding civilizations,” cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2021.
But history survived. Eight years after ISIS abandoned Mosul, the city's multicultural landmarks are open again. A ceremony last week marked the culmination of UNESCO’s $115 million “Revive the Spirit of Mosul” campaign, which saw local workers reconstruct their city’s cultural and religious sites.
“This intervention in a post-conflict environment was unprecedented in its complexity,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay tells Stella Martany of the Associated Press. “80 percent of the Old City had been destroyed. When our first team arrived on-site in 2018, they were faced with a field of ruins.”
Among the major sites restored from ruins are the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, its leaning minaret and the Al-Tahera and Al-Sa’aa churches. All are symbols of Mosul’s rich past and glimmers of hope for a flourishing future.
For Shakir Mahmoud, a father of six who runs a small market out of his house in the Old City, the minaret was the last sight he saw as he fled the city in 2017, as fighting between the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and ISIS intensified. Not long after he left, ISIS militants detonated explosives and flattened the minaret.
“My heart ached with pain when I heard the news,” Mahmoud tells the National’s Sinan Mahmoud and Aymen Al-Ameri. “To this day, it hurts the soul whenever we remember the incident.”
Built in the 12th century, the minaret was affectionately nicknamed al-Hadba, or “the hunchback,” for its signature stoop. Five times a day, a muezzin would climb nearly 150 feet in the tower’s spiral stairway to sing the call to prayer. It was a symbol not only of Mosul, but of all of Iraq. It even appeared on the 10,000 dinar banknote, hunch and all.
When it crumbled from the skyline, the city took on a completely alien character, Ali al-Baroodi, a photographer from Mosul, tells the BBC’s Sebastian Usher.
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"It was not the city that we knew—it was like a metamorphosis—that we never imagined, not even in our worst nightmares,” he explains. “I fell silent after that for a couple of days. I lost my voice. I lost my mind.”
Restoration of the mosque and minaret was a delicate process. Artifacts had to be carefully parsed from the detritus of war. Only original materials were used, a measure that keeps it on the UNESCO World Heritage list, according to the AP.
Even more complicated was reconstructing the minaret with its iconic slouch, a position that it naturally assumed over centuries. The engineering team consulted with experts on the Leaning Tower of Pisa to generate structural integrity without using internal steel beams, according to the Art Newspaper’s Hadani Ditmars.
“My most moving memory is when the scaffolding of the al-Hadba minaret was removed, and we could suddenly see it again, leaning as it was before its destruction, just as the people of Mosul had asked us to restore it,” Azoulay tells the National’s Mina Aldroubi.
The reconstruction effort also worked on several sites of Christian heritage. In 2003, some 50,000 Christians lived in Mosul. Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the years of extremist violence that followed, most fled. Less than 20 Christian families live in Mosul, according to the AP.
But Mosul’s churches have long served as hubs for Christians scattered across the region, and some officials are hopeful that restored buildings—including the Al-Tahera church, which ISIS used as a prison—might spur a revival of the city's Christian community.
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“When Mosul Christians come to this church, they remember the place where they got educated and baptized, and the place where they prayed. This could possibly give them an incentive to return,” Mar Benedictus Younan Hanno, Archbishop of Mosul for Syriac Catholics, tells the AP.
Mosul was once home to a thriving Jewish population as well, although its Jewish Quarter is still in disrepair with no restoration in progress.
The UNESCO project, which was funded largely by the United Arab Emirates and the European Union, also included the restoration of 124 old houses and 100 classrooms, according to a statement. It trained 1,300 local young people in traditional skills and created 6,000 jobs in the community, chief architect Maria Rita Acetoso tells the BBC.
Mahmoud, the father of six, is once again living in the bent shadow of the minaret. "It is a restoration to our souls,” he tells the National. “We are thrilled to see these landmarks of Mosul rising again, bringing hope of brighter days ahead."
