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REUTERS
MOSUL, Iraq
The leaning minaret of Mosul's Grand al-Nuri Mosque survived conquests by the Mongols and the Ottomans, neglect under Saddam Hussein, and air raids during the Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. invasion in 2003.
But after three years of Islamic State rule, it is now little more than a pile of stones at the centre of a shattered city.
By all accounts except their own, the militants rigged the mosque and its 850-year-old tower with explosives and blew them up last week as advancing Iraqi forces came within steps of the complex.
A Reuters visit to the site on Friday, a day after Iraq's military recaptured it, confirmed the extent of destruction: the 45-metre (148 ft) al-Hadba minaret had been reduced to a stump while the mint green dome was the only part of the prayer hall still standing.
Fighting raged on a few blocks away. Bullets whizzed past the main gate, which is largely intact, and a mortar fell on an adjacent building.
Below the mosque's dome in July 2014, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon presenting himself at the head of a modern-day caliphate spanning swathes of territory which the al Qaeda offshoot group had just seized in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
"I am your leader, though I am not the best of you," he said, wearing the black turban and robes denoting a claim to descend from the Prophet Mohammad.
Within months, Islamic State was carrying out and inspiring militant attacks in places as far abreast as Paris, London and California. An international military coalition led by the United States quickly coalesced to confront the group.
Three years on, the inscribed pulpit where he spoke lies in ruins. The mosque grounds are covered in stone and concrete, and a segment of a secondary minaret is one of the only discernable objects in the rubble. The risk of unexploded ordnance or mines prevented a thorough inspection of the site's interior.
Baghdadi's appearance at the Nuri mosque was the first time he revealed himself to the world, and the footage broadcast then is to this day the only video recording of him as"caliph".
