Mosul - The leaning minaret of Mosul's Grand al-Nuri Mosque survived conquests by the Mongols and the Ottomans, neglect under Saddam Hussein, and air raids during the Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. invasion in 2003. But after three years of ISIS (Daesh) rule, it is now little more than a pile of stones at the center of a shattered city. By all accounts except their own, the extremists rigged the mosque and its 850-year-old tower with explosives and blew them up last week as advancing Iraqi forces came within steps of the complex. A Reuters visit to the site on Friday, a day after Iraq's military recaptured it, confirmed the extent of destruction: the 45-meter (148 ft) al-Hadba minaret had been reduced to a stump while the mint green dome was the only part of the prayer hall still standing. Fighting raged on a few blocks away. Bullets whizzed past the main gate, which is largely intact, and a mortar fell on an adjacent building. Below the mosque's dome in July 2014, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon presenting himself at the head of a modern-day caliphate spanning swathes of territory which the Al-Qaeda offshoot group had just seized in Iraq and neighboring Syria. Three years on, the inscribed pulpit where he spoke lies in ruins. The mosque grounds are covered in stone and concrete, and a segment of a secondary minaret is one of the only discernible objects in the rubble. The risk of unexploded ordnance or mines prevented a thorough inspection of the site's interior. After his speech in 2014, Baghdadi descended from the pulpit to lead his followers in worship, standing in a prayer niche which is now just barely recognizable amid the wreckage.