Rebuilding Jonah’s mosque

In April of 2018, a team of archaeologists discovered remnants of an Assyrian palace structure below the remnants of the Mosque of the Prophet Yonis (Jonah) in Mosul that had been destroyed by Islamic State militants in 2014. The Mosque is the center of a “clash between archaeologists keen to excavate the pre-Islamic site, on the one hand, and local Muslim authorities, on the other.” As Muslim traditionalists lobby to reconstruct the site, archaeologists are moving to excavate the palace found below the mosque.