Uwais al-Qarni Mosque

A former Twelver Shi'a mosque in Raqqa built around the traditional burial site of Uwais al-Qarani and Ammar ibn Yasir, two companions killed in 657 CE at the Battle of Siffin, fought some 40 km west of the city. The shrine complex was expanded into a monumental Iranian-backed rebuild between 1988 and 2005, becoming one of the largest Shi'a mausoleums in Syria and a major pilgrimage site once Iranian access to Najaf and Karbala was cut off during the Iran-Iraq War. ISIS demolished the mosque with explosives on 31 May 2014, calling it a "pagan Iranian shrine." As of 2026 it remains destroyed, with some documentation and salvage work underway toward an eventual symbolic reconstruction.