As his family’s mud-brick house shook and the windows shattered, he huddled in the living room with his wife and five young children.

And the militants bulldozed Nimrud’s ziggurat, the mud-brick base of a once-soaring ancient temple, reducing it to a nondescript pile of dirt.

Elsewhere in Africa, it is becoming more and more common to see villagers connecting cellphones to single solar panels outside mud-brick homes.