Iraqi forces retake bombed-out Jonah’s tomb

Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State group in Mosul have retaken an area where the jihadists in 2014 leveled a shrine revered as the tomb of the biblical Jonah, officials said.

“We retook control of Nabi Yunus area… raised the Iraqi flag above the tomb,” Sabah al-Noman, spokesman for the Counter-Terrorism Service spearheading the Mosul offensive, tells AFP.

People inspect the destroyed Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul, Iraq, on Thursday, July 24, 2014. (photo credit/AP)

He says two other neighborhoods in eastern Mosul were also retaken from IS on Monday.

Iraqis walk down a street while smoke rises in the background following a car bomb explosion in eastern Mosul, on January 15, 2017. (AFP / Dimitar DILKOFF)

The Nabi Yunus shrine — which was built on the reputed burial site of a prophet known in the Quran as Yunus and in the Bible as Jonah — was a popular pilgrimage site.

In July 2014, weeks after overrunning Mosul and much of Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland, IS militants rigged the shrine and blew it up, sparking global outrage.

— AFP