Earthquake damages Samarra on the Tigris

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A powerful earthquake struck the old Abbasid capital of Samarra on the middle Tigris, toppling the upper courses of its famous spiral minaret - the Malwiya - and rupturing the ancient irrigation canals that had sustained the Mesopotamian agricultural heartland for over a thousand years. The quake accelerated the region's slow demographic hemorrhage southward toward Baghdad and left much of the once-great city permanently abandoned.