Mosul's leaning minaret rises again

For more than 840 years a leaning minaret stood over Mosul. The al-Hadba, the hunchback, rose beside the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, where the city's old quarter met the west bank of the Tigris, and it leaned so far that people had wondered for centuries when it would fall. It did not fall. In June 2017 it was blown up, along with the mosque, in the last days of the fighting to retake the city.

Nearly a decade on, both have been rebuilt, and Mosul's old city is coming back to life around them.

A landmark, rebuilt stone by stone

The reconstruction was led by UNESCO under an initiative called Revive the Spirit of Mosul, and it set out to put the minaret back as it was, lean and all, rather than straighten it. Old stones were recovered from the rubble and reused where they could be, and the brickwork patterns that gave the tower its face were copied back onto it. The mosque beside it was rebuilt too, and the churches of the old city, among them a Syriac Catholic church and a convent, were restored in the same years, so that the quarter comes back as the mix it always was.

The ancient city across the river

Mosul is young next to its neighbour. Directly across the Tigris lie the ruins of Nineveh, which around 700 BC was the largest city in the world, the capital of Assyria, with walls and a palace and the library whose clay tablets carried the flood story older than the Bible's. The two sit within sight of each other: one of the oldest cities humans ever built, and a 12th-century landmark that has just been built a second time.

A plan run from Paris

The work was coordinated from UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, and paid for largely from abroad. On the map the story runs from a drawing board beside the Eiffel Tower to a riverbank in northern Iraq, where a tower that leaned for eight centuries, was destroyed in an afternoon, and now leans again.