Mosul, June 25: A bomb on Friday damaged the perimeter wall of the Nabi Yunes mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, revered by Christians as the burial place of the Biblical prophet Jonah, police said.
The explosion caused no casualties and the mosque itself was untouched, police said.
The large mosque, built on the site of an earlier church, sits on a hill that marks one of the two main settlement mounds of ancient Nineveh, in the eastern part of modern Mosul.
It lies not far from the surviving walls and gates of the great Assyrian city constructed at the turn of the 7th century BC.
The mosque’s current prayer leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdul-Wahab Shammaa, is a follower of the mystic Sufi tradition of the Muslim faith which is anathema to hardline Islamists.
-Agencies