The news of the destruction of the 12th-century Great Mosque of al-Nuri and the adjacent al-Hadba Minaret left me speechless ... No building is ever as important as the people living in a city. The loss of life is the worst news we can hear. Yet it is also heartbreaking to lose remarkable structures and the memory of those who created them. Monuments, libraries, museums, religious traditions, poetry, folk tales, and other embodiments of cultural heritage connect people to the places they live. Our understanding of places is bound profoundly to the people we meet and the appreciation of art, architecture, and cultural traditions that we encounter.

For more than 800 years, al-Hadba Minaret was an essential feature of the Mosul cityscape. I had learned about the history and importance of the complex in which al-Hadba stood in 2009, when the monument was included on the 2010 World Monuments Watch, our biannual list of threatened sites and remarkable conservation opportunities. Our hope was that WMF would find the means to assist Iraqi colleagues with its conservation. The local heritage authority in Mosul was concerned that the minaret was unstable and needed a full engineering inspection. Their hope was that the Watch would bring the necessary resources to address these problems.