The BBC reported that "IS accused the United States-led coalition aircraft of bombing the site, but experts said a video circulated online appeared to show charges inside the structures exploding.

[5] Tradition holds that Nur ad-Din Zangi, a Turkoman atabeg of the Zengid dynasty and sultan of its Syrian province, built the mosque in 1172–1173, shortly before his death.

Grattan Geary, a 19th-century traveler, described the minaret's appearance: It is several feet out of the perpendicular, though it starts fair from the ground, and at the top, before putting on its gallery and dome, it regains an erect posture.

[8]When the cylindrical minaret was built it stood 45 metres (148 ft) high, with seven bands of decorative brickwork in complex geometric patterns ascending in levels towards the top.

[11] According to local tradition (which ignores chronology), the minaret gained its tilt after the Islamic prophet Muhammad passed overhead while ascending to heaven.

[12] According to local Christian tradition, however, the mosque's tilt was due to its bowing towards the tomb of the Virgin Mary, reputedly located near Arbil.

The tomb is also described to be dedicated to an unspecified personality named Shaykh Al-Nuri[15] however it has also been associated with the mosque's founder, Nur al-Din Mahmud Zangi[16] who was instead buried in Damascus.

[9] The structure was targeted by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants who occupied Mosul on 10 June 2014, and had previously destroyed the Tomb of Yunus.

[18] Rather than destroying the site, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared during a Friday prayer in this mosque on 4 July 2014 to declare the formation of a new caliphate.

[25] The project plan is the preservation of the square base of the leaning minaret as a memorial to the victims of ISIS as well as the construction of a replica which would be visible in the Mosul skyline.

[26] During the announcement, the UAE minister of Culture and Knowledge Development Noura Al Kaabi spoke at the Chatham House in central London and stated that "This is an initiative that defeats extremism in all its facets" and "[w]e don't want to allow the destruction of the past and the present".

[11] On November 13th 2024, at approximately 1030am, construction workers fitted a pole with an Iraqi flag on top of the minaret marking the end of the reconstruction process.