Bash Tapia Castle

Bash Tapia Castle was a 12th-century fortress on the western bank of the Tigris River within the old city walls of Mosul — one of the rare surviving examples of medieval fortification architecture in northern Iraq. For centuries it defined the city's skyline and served as a beloved civic landmark. In April 2015, the Islamic State systematically demolished the site as part of a broader campaign to erase Mosul's pre-Islamic and medieval heritage. What remains today is a rubble-strewn site on the Tigris embankment, visited less as a tourist attraction than as a sobering memorial to deliberate cultural destruction. For Mosul's inhabitants, its fate stands as a symbol of everything the city lost during the IS occupation of 2014 to 2017.