Mosulמוסול

Northern Iraq — Kurdish Jewish region

Mosul is a city on the Tigris in northern Iraq; the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, lie on its eastern side. Arab Muslim forces took it in the 630s or early 640s. It later flourished under the Hamdanids and, from 1127, as the seat of the Zengid dynasty, and it was a centre of Islamic scholarship where the historian Ibn al-Athir lived and worked. The Mongols sacked it in 1262, and the Ottomans later ruled it for centuries. Its mixed population included Assyrian Christians and an old Jewish community, and in the seventeenth century Asenath Barzani led a yeshiva there. Nearly all Iraqi Jews left for Israel in 1950-52. The Islamic State held it in 2014-2017.

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