The United Nations said they discovered five bombs in a wall of Mosul’s iconic Al-Nuri mosque, planted years ago by the Islamic State group, during restoration work in the northern Iraqi city.
A UNESCO representative told AFP late Friday that the team working at the site discovered five “large-scale explosive devices, designed to trigger a massive destruction of the site” in the prayer hall’s southern wall on Tuesday.
The 12th-century Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul and the nearby leaning minaret known as Al-Hadba, or the “hunchback,” were destroyed in the fight to retake the city from IS.
The Iraqi army claimed that IS, which controlled the city for three years, had detonated explosives there.
The UN cultural organization UNESCO has been working to restore the site and the city’s other architectural heritage, much of which was destroyed in the fight to retake the city in 2017.
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“The Iraqi armed forces immediately secured the area and the situation is now fully under control,” UNESCO added.
Although one bomb was taken out, four more “remain connected to each other” and should be cleared in the next few days, according to the statement.
“These explosive devices were hidden inside a wall, which was specially rebuilt around them: it 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, spokesperson for the Joint Operations Command of various Iraqi forces, confirmed the discovery of “several explosive devices from ISIS jihadists in Al-Nuri mosque.”
In July 2014, the then-leader of IS, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, declared the creation of the group’s “caliphate” from the Al-Nuri mosque.
Large portions of Iraq and neighboring Syria were overrun by the jihadists, who brutally ruled over them.
In 2017, IS was driven from Mosul by Iraqi forces supported by a coalition led by the US.
AFP
