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When the 3,000 men of the mainly Kurdish
3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division of the Iraqi Army go on patrol
it is at night, after the rigorously enforced curfew starts at
8pm. Their vehicles, bristling with heavy machine guns, race
through the empty streets of the city, splashing through pools
of sewage, always trying to take different routes to avoid roadside
bombs. "The government cannot control the city," said
Hamid Effendi, an experienced ex-soldier who is Minister for
Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government.
He is influential in the military
affairs of Mosul province with its large Kurdish minority, although
it is outside the Kurdish region. He believes: "The Iraqi
Army is only a small force in Mosul, the Americans do not leave
their bases much and some of the police are connected to the
terrorists." In the days since a suicide bomber killed 43
young men waiting to join the Iraqi army at a recruitment centre
near Mosul last week soldiers in the city have been expecting
a second attack.
"We are not leaving the
base in daytime because we know other bombers are waiting for
us," said a soldier at a base near Mosul's city centre.
Saadi Pire, until recently
the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, says
bluntly that the 12,000 police "are police by day and terrorists
by night. They should all be dismissed and other police brought
in from outside."
He thinks that Mosul, the northern
capital of Iraq with a population of 1.7 million, could erupt
at any moment. He points out that it is difficult to pacify because
so much of Saddam Hussein's army--some 250,000 soldiers and 30,000
officers--was recruited from there.
General Muthafar Deirky, the
ebullient commander of the 3rd Brigade, is more confident about
the government's grip the city. He has been stationed there since
November 11, 2004 when, in one of the least publicized disasters
of the US occupation of Iraq, insurgents captured the city as
the police and army deserted en masse. Some 11,000 weapons and
vehicles worth $40m were lost.
The American media was almost
entirely embedded with the US Marines who were engaged in the
bloody battle for Fallujah, population 350,000, so the outside
world did not notice that the anti-American resistance had captured
a city five times as large.
General Deirky, a peshmerga
veteran, was called in a panic by the army commander in Baghdad
who told him that "Mosul was under the control of terrorists".
He gathered 700 men and, having fought off two ambushes, advanced
into the city just in time to prevent the capture of the television
station. He was dismayed to discover that out of an 1,800-strong
Iraqi Army unit all but 30 Kurds had deserted.
After a brisk counter-attack
by the 3rd Brigade and American troops the guerrillas evaporated
having chosen not, as in Fallujah, to stand and fight. General
Deirky says most of the resistance cells were later eliminated.
He claims that the situation
is very different today when the people of Mosul "welcome
us, hate the terrorists and give us information about them".
But the general's own account of recent events in the city show
the depth of the divisions between Arabs and Kurds as well the
Arab hostility to the occupation.
For instance at the end of
last year the Arab chief of police Ahmed al-Jibouri, appointed
after the uprising, was dismissed with 40 of his officers for
aiding the insurgents. "He was telling people that every
family should have one of its members in the resistance,"
recalled the general.
In reality, Mosul city, like
so many places in Iraq, is an ethnic minefield which the US has
sought to negotiate with varying success since the overthrow
of Saddamin 2003. At first US commanders did not want Kurdish
forces in the city fearing the reaction of the Arabs.
General David Petraeus of the
101st Airborne tried to bring on board the Sunni Arabs but when
he left this policy languished. Since November 2004 Arabs in
the province claim that the US has simply joined forces with
the Kurds after the mass desertion of the Arab police and army.
"The Americans are now
just one more of the tribes of Mosul," said one Arab source
alleging that the CIA got all its information from Kurdish intelligence.
Most soldiers have an ethnic
map of Mosul imprinted on their brain. "I feel safer now
because there is nothing but Kurdish villages from now on,"
said a driver, with a sign of a relief, as we drove away from
the city.
For the moment nobody is wholly
in control and most expect more fighting.
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