Shock and anger in Mosul after Islamic State destroys historic mosque

"When I looked out of the window and saw the minaret was no longer there, I felt a part of me had died."

For Ahmed Saied, a 54-year-old Iraqi schoolteacher, and many others Mosul can never be the same after Islamic State militants blew up up the leaning minaret that had graced his city for nearly 850 years.

Militants destroyed the Grand al-Nuri Mosque on Wednesday evening along with its famous minaret, affectionately called al-Hadba, or "the hunchback" by Iraqis. In the dawn light, all that remained was the base projecting from shattered masonry.

The destruction came as Iraqi forces closed on the mosque, which also carried enormous symbolic importance for Islamic State whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used it in 2014 to declare a "caliphate" spanning swathes of of Syria and Iraq.

His black flag had been flying on the 150-foot (45-metre) minaret since June 2014, after Islamic State fighters surged across Iraq, seizing vast swathes of territory.

The insurgents chose to blow it up rather than see the flag taken down by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces battling through the maze of narrow alleys and streets of the Old City, the last district still under control of Islamic State in Mosul.

"In the early morning, I climbed up to my house roof and was stunned to see the Hadba minaret had gone," Nashwan, a day- labourer living in Khazraj neighborhood near the mosque, said by phone. "I broke into tears. I felt I had lost a son of mine."

The minaret was built with seven bands of decorative brickwork in complex geometric patterns also found in Persia and Central Asia.