Nineveh appears in the Hebrew Bible as the enemy capital, and two of its books celebrate the fall. Nahum is a poem of triumph over the destruction, and Zephaniah promises the city will become a dry waste where flocks lie down. Set against them is Jonah, which is a satire on the prophet rather than an oracle against the city. Sent to announce destruction, Jonah runs the other way, is swallowed and returned, preaches a single sentence, and watches the entire population repent including a king who puts sackcloth on the animals. God spares them, and Jonah is furious. The book ends with a question about whether mercy to a city of the ignorant is worth resenting, and gives no answer.
The story travelled. The gospels use the sign of Jonah for the three days in the tomb, and the Quran tells of Yunus, also called Dhu al-Nun, who left in anger and called out from the darkness. A mosque on the mound of Nebi Yunus within modern Mosul, built over an earlier church, was venerated by Muslims, Christians and Jews as his tomb.
That shrine was destroyed with explosives in July 2014 by the group holding the city, along with other shrines and the Nergal Gate reliefs. Tunnels dug beneath the mound afterwards, apparently looking for antiquities to sell, opened into an unexcavated Assyrian palace. The same period drove out most of the region's Christian population and produced the campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar that a United Nations commission of inquiry found to constitute genocide.