BEIRUT — The minaret of a landmark 11th-century mosque in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo was destroyed Wednesday, leaving the once-soaring stone tower a pile of rubble and twisted metal scattered in the tiled courtyard.
President Bashar Assad’s regime and anti-government activists traded blame for the destruction to the Umayyad Mosque, which occurred in the heart Aleppo’s walled Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
It was the second time in just over a week that a historic Sunni mosque in Syria has been seriously damaged. Mosques served as a launching pad for anti-government protests in the early days of the country’s 2-year-old uprising, and many have been targeted.
Syrian’s state news agency SANA said rebels from the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra group blew it up, while Aleppo-based activist Mohammed al-Khatib said a Syrian army tank fired a shell that “totally destroyed” the minaret.
The mosque fell into rebel hands this year after heavy fighting that damaged the historic compound. The area around it, however, remains contested. Syrian troops are about 200 yards away.
An amateur video posted online by the anti-government Aleppo Media Center activist group showed the mosque’s archways, charred from earlier fighting, and a pile of rubble where the minaret used to be.
Standing inside the mosque’s courtyard, a man who appears to be a rebel fighter says regime forces recently fired seven shells at the minaret but failed to knock it down. He said that on Wednesday the tank rounds struck their target.
“We were standing here today and suddenly shells started hitting the minaret,” the man says. “(The army) then tried to storm the mosque, but we pushed them back.”
The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting of the events depicted.
The damage is just part of the wider devastation caused by the country’s crisis. The fighting has exacted a huge toll on the country, killing more than 70,000 people, laying waste to cities, towns and villages and forcing more than a million people to flee their homes and seek refuge abroad.
On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel indicated that he was caught by surprise when Israeli officials publicly revealed their assessment that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons.
Hagel told reporters that his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Yaalon, did not alert him to the assessment when they met in Tel Aviv on Monday. The assessment was announced publicly on Tuesday by a senior official with Israel’s military intelligence office.
“They did not give me that assessment. I guess it was not complete,” Hagel said after hours of meetings with senior Egyptian officials in Cairo on the fourth stop of a Mideast tour. “So I have not seen the specifics of it” or discussed it with Israeli officials.
He said he and Yaalon discussed the issue of Syria’s chemical weapons, but Hagel would not elaborate further.
