Mosque of Prophet Yunus A.S. (Jonah)

On a hill rising above eastern Mosul stands a shrine that Muslims, Christians and Jews have honoured for centuries as the tomb of the Prophet Jonah — Yunus in the Quran — the man swallowed by a great fish and sent to warn the city of Nineveh. The hill is itself one of the ancient mounds of Nineveh, so for generations worshippers climbed to pray directly above the buried Assyrian capital, never guessing how much lay beneath their feet.

In July 2014 ISIS packed the shrine with explosives and destroyed it. Yet in trying to erase the past, the militants accidentally revealed it. Hunting for antiquities to loot, they dug a warren of crude tunnels — nearly a kilometre in all — straight into the hillside, and broke through the walls of a previously unknown Assyrian palace. Its rooms still carried cuneiform inscriptions and carved reliefs; one marble inscription bore the name of King Esarhaddon, dating the work to around 672 BCE.

When Mosul was freed, a small Iraqi team raced into the unstable tunnels to record what had survived, working under the threat of daily collapse. Today the shrine is being rebuilt — a sacred place layered, quite literally, over one of the great palaces of the ancient world. (Tradition holds this to be Jonah's tomb; historians are less certain, but the hill's hold on the faithful has never loosened.)