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MOSUL, Iraq -- U.S. and Iraqi troops stormed
insurgent-held police stations and neighborhoods in
the northern city of Mosul yesterday, retaking a
number of sites seized last week by gunmen who rose
up in support of militants in Fallujah.
Throughout the day, a series of bloody attacks and
counterattacks erupted across Mosul. Insurgents
lobbed mortars at three police stations they had
held, destroying one almost entirely before
retreating ahead of the U.S. assault.
Militants also rammed a car bomb into a convoy of
American soldiers and Iraqi National Guardsmen,
killing several of the Iraqi troops as well as a
number of civilian bystanders, witnesses said. And
attackers launched deadly attacks on the offices of
a Kurdish political party.
Local officials declared a 4 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew
and closed the bridges into the city in an effort to
stop the movement of guerrillas and gain control of
the situation.
While the insurgency in Mosul not as deeply
entrenched as in Fallujah, the surge of violence in
Iraq's third-largest city, with 1.7 million people,
is potentially grave. If fighting escalates further,
it might set off ethnic unrest, and civilian
casualties could soar.
The uprising in Mosul, 225 miles north of Baghdad,
has been fueled by a combustible combination of
ethnic tension and competing political allegiances.
The city is home to ethnic Kurds and Turkomans who
have clashed frequently with Mosul's Arabs.
While Kurds have been among the Iraqis most
accepting of the U.S. presence in Iraq, many of
Mosul's Arabs are former members of Saddam Hussein's
regime.
Like the insurgents in Fallujah, Mosul's Arabs are
Sunnis who believe they have little to gain by
cooperating with the U.S. goal of creating a new
government, which almost certainly will be led by
Shiites. Shiite Muslims are the majority sect in
Iraq, but Sunnis held the balance of political power
under Saddam.
While U.S. and Iraqi military leaders believe that
some insurgents have migrated from Fallujah to Mosul,
the majority of fighters appear to be local.
Neither U.S. forces nor local hospitals have
released information about the numbers of people
injured or killed in the fighting in Mosul, but
witnesses described scenes of burning cars and other
carnage across several neighborhoods yesterday.
As a steady rain fell on the city, coils of heavy
black smoke rose from the impoverished Islaah Al-Zeraii
district, a stronghold of insurgents. The car bomb
had just exploded, sending a pickup carrying the
Iraqi National Guardsmen up in flames. Blood covered
the pavement and shards of twisted metal and glass
were scattered hundreds of yards away.
"It was like hell when we heard the explosion," said
Sallam Abid, a store owner who was cleaning blood
from the ground in front of his shop after the
blast. "I think more than 7 civilians were killed."
Two other attacks targeted the headquarters and a
branch office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
one of the two largest Kurdish political parties.
According to witnesses, a car with weapons and three
people inside had careened toward a checkpoint
manned by Kurdish peshmerga militiamen. The
militiamen fired on the car, which then exploded,
killing the three occupants.
The struggle to retake Mosul came as the family of a
kidnapped British-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan,
said they believed that she was the woman shown
being executed on a videotape sent to Al-Jazeera,
the Arab satellite TV network, yesterday but not
aired. Hassan was abducted in Baghdad last month as
she drove to work. She would be the first foreign
female hostage in Iraq to be executed.
http://www.post-gazette.com
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