UAE FUNDS REBUILDING OF MOSUL’S AL NURI MOSQUE
▶ Plans for it to rise again less than year after ISIS destroyed its famous minaret
The UAE will fund the rebuilding of the Great Mosque of Al Nuri, which was last year destroyed by ISIS, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The UAE Minister of Culture Noura Al Kaabi yesterday visited Baghdad to launch the project.
The Ministry has funded the UN’s heritage agency in a US$50.4 million (Dh185.1m) plan to rebuild the mosque and its minaret, which was where in 2014 ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi announced establishing a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
The 800-year-old mosque, with its famous leaning minaret, was destroyed by the extremists as one of their last acts before Mosul was liberated in June. Its five-year restoration will be the UAE’s first major reconstruction project in Iraq and the flagship of Unesco’s Revive the Spirit of Mosul plan. It is the largest project of its kind.
The UAE will work closely in Mosul during the five-year process of restoration, which is expected to create 1,000 jobs.
Ms Al Kaabi signed two agreements in Baghdad, one with the Iraqi Ministry of Culture for advanced cultural co-operation, the first such MoU between the two countries since 1977. The second was with Unesco.
After touring the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, Ms Al Kaabi said this project and the expanded cultural collaboration with Iraq stemmed from “strategic and historic ties with Iraq”, adding that the revival of Al Nuri mosque is part of “humanity’s heritage”.
“What is important to us is restoring hope,” Ms Al Kaabi said.
Giovanni Antonelli, a senior consultant for Unesco, said that the first year of the mosque project would be used to clear rubble and explosives and conduct archaeological surveys. Reconstruction will take four years.
“At the end there will be the creation of a memorial and the establishment of a museum to narrate this episode of destruction,” Mr Antonelli told The National.
In December 2016, at a summit
hosted by Abu Dhabi at the Emirates Palace hotel, the UAE, France and Unesco announced a separate $100m fund, Aliph, to help preserve endangered cultural heritage.
The first intentions for the fund were protecting heritage in the middle of conflict. But now that ISIS has been driven from most of Iraq and Syria, rebuilding the great sites of Mosul, Aleppo, Palmyra, Ninevah and others can begin.
The Great Mosque had deep importance to Mosul. The minaret was popularly known as Al Hadba, or “the hunchback”, and the image of the mosque is on the Iraqi 10,000 dinar note.
It was one of the victims of ISIS’s sworn mission to destroy major heritage sites in the territories under its control. All that remains of Al Hadba is a three-storey structure.
The project is only beginning, but Mr Antonelli said co-ordinators expected to restore this building and, rather than restoring the old Hadba, build a new minaret next to it.
Whether the new minaret will keep Al Hadba’s distinctive lean is unclear. It was already listing in the 14th century when the famous explorer Ibn Battuta visited Mosul.
It is likely the bricks facing the sun in the heat of the day had swelled, disrupting the brickwork. It underwent repair work in the 1970s but was destabilised again during the Iran-Iraq war, when bombing burst underground pipes and caused flooding below the mosque.
In 2008, the minaret was leaning 2.4 metres from perpendicular and the crack that was forming between the bricks from the stress on the structure was big enough for a fist.
The minaret holds deep symbolic significance. Iraqi security forces reportedly focused on the sight of Al Hadba to keep their spirits up as they slowly advanced towards the town to retake it from ISIS.
That sight of a minaret rising from the Great Mosque of Al Nuri will be a powerful image of the city’s rebirth.