Great Mosque of Al Nouri

For almost 850 years, the Great Mosque of al-Nuri was the beating heart of Mosul's Old City — the place where the whole community gathered for Friday prayer. It was founded in 1172–73 by Nur al-Din Zangi, the Turkoman ruler who united much of the region, and it took his name: al-Nuri. From its courtyard rose the famous leaning al-Hadba minaret, and for eight centuries the dense lanes of the old town pressed close around it.

In July 2014 the mosque entered modern history for the darkest of reasons: it was from this pulpit that the leader of ISIS proclaimed his self-styled "caliphate." Three years later, on the night of 21 June 2017, as Iraqi forces closed in to liberate the city, the militants packed the mosque and its minaret with explosives and brought them down. Iraq's prime minister called the act "a declaration of defeat."

What followed became a symbol of Mosul's revival. Under UNESCO's "Revive the Spirit of Mosul" initiative, funded by the United Arab Emirates, conservators rebuilt the mosque from bricks salvaged out of the rubble, using the same medieval techniques. Digging beneath the prayer hall in 2021, archaeologists uncovered four rooms from the original 12th-century mosque — complete with channels for water — that no historical record had ever mentioned. The mosque reopened in 2025, its ancient form raised once more from its own stones.