A United Nations agency said it had found five bombs in the wall of the iconic Al-Nuri Mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul that were planted by Islamic State group jihadists during renovation work several years ago.
A Unesco team working at the site on Tuesday found five “large-scale explosive devices designed to cause large-scale destruction of the site” in the southern wall of the prayer hall, an agency representative told AFP late Friday.
Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque and its adjacent leaning minaret, known as al-Hadba, or “the Hunchback,” which dates back to the 12th century, were destroyed during the battle to retake the city from IS.
The Iraqi military accused IS, which has occupied Mosul for three years, of planting explosives and blowing it up.
UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, is working to restore the mosque and other architectural heritage sites in the city, most of which were reduced to rubble in a battle to reclaim it in 2017.
“The Iraqi armed forces promptly secured the area and the situation is now fully under control,” UNESCO said.
It said one bomb was removed but four other 1.5-kilogram (3.3-pound) devices were “connected to each other” and expected to be removed in the coming days.
‘Complex manufacturing’
“These explosive devices were hidden inside a wall that had been specifically rebuilt around them: this explains why they could not be discovered when the site was cleared by Iraqi forces in 2020,” the agency said.
Iraqi General Tahseen al-Khafaji, a spokesman for the Joint Operations Command of various Iraqi forces, confirmed the discovery of “several explosive devices belonging to ISIS jihadists at the al-Nuri Mosque”.
He said provincial demolition personnel had sought help from the Baghdad-based Defense Ministry to disable the remaining weapons because they were complex in construction.
Construction work at the site has been suspended until the bombs are removed.
In July 2014, IS’s then-leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of the group’s “caliphate” from the al-Nuri Mosque.
The jihadists seized control of large parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria and ruled brutally.
Iraqi forces backed by a US-led coalition drove IS out of Mosul in 2017.
The Al-Nuri Mosque is named after Nureddin al-Zinki, the unifier of Syria, who also ruled Mosul for a while and ordered its construction in 1172.
It was destroyed and rebuilt as part of a renovation project in 1942, with only the ancient minaret surviving from the original structure.
Al-Nouri’s current renovation, largely funded by the UAE, is expected to be completed in December 2024.
UNESCO said this would finally erase the “stigma” of IS occupation.
The minaret – which will be rebuilt at the request of locals – is being renovated with 45,000 original bricks salvaged from the rubble, which is only a third of the original structure.
The bombing of Al-Nuri was not surprising at first. In January 2022, restoration teams unearthed an underground prayer chamber from the original 12th-century building.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
