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Insurgents increased their efforts to take control
of Mosul yesterday, ambushing a convoy of Kurdish
peshmerga fighters and attacking the Kurdish deputy
governor of Nineveh province.
The US military commander in Mosul, Brigadier
General Carter Ham, has warned that militants,
mainly Sunni Arabs, are trying to foment civil war
in the ethnically mixed city of 2 million.
Three peshmerga were killed and seven injured when
their convoy was attacked on the main road into
eastern Mosul, said Kareem Sinjari, the interior
minister of the Kurdistan regional government in
Irbil.
"There was an exchange of fire. We took some hits,
but so did they," he said.
The fighters, under the command of the Kurdistan
Democratic party, led by Massoud Barzani, were on
their way to protect the party offices in Mosul,
which have come under frequent attack since a
two-day uprising this month.
The deputy governor, Khasro Gouran, a Kurd, was
attacked as he was leaving his office. One of his
bodyguards was killed and two people, including his
brother, were wounded.
Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, has been simmering
for the past fortnight, since nine police stations
were captured by insurgents.
Up to 3,200 of the city's 4,000 police officers
either deserted or joined the insurgents during the
attacks.
Security is now in the hands of a small unit of US
soldiers, aided by Kurdish units of the Iraqi
national guard, which carried out a number of
limited operations in insurgent areas yesterday, and
an elite police commando unit.
Thousands of peshmerga have poured into the city,
partly to protect party offices, but also to protect
the Kurdish minority, and the Christian, Turkoman
and Yezidi communities.
Their presence has angered many of the majority
Sunni Arab community and raised the prospect of a
wider conflict between Arabs and Kurds.
Mosul lies to the west of the Kurdish-ruled area but
is regarded by US commanders and Kurdish leaders as
crucial to the Kurdish region's stability.
"It's especially important for Iraq, the north and
the Kurdish leaders to recognise that their security
is dependent on the security in Mosul," General Ham
said.
In the past week at least 20 bodies of Iraqi police
officers, national guardsmen and Kurdish militiamen
- some decapitated - have been found in Mosul. The
group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
has claimed responsibility for the killing.
In his latest purported audiotape Mr Zarqawi accused
Muslim scholars of silence in the face of US action
in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying they had "let us
down in the darkest circumstances".
"You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the
countries and the people to the Jews and Crusaders
... when you resort to silence on their crimes, when
you refused to hold the banners of Jihad and Tawhid,
and when you prevented youth from heading to the
battlefields in order to defend the religion."
· The US army said it had replaced Major General
Geoffrey Miller, the officer in charge of its
detention centres in Iraq, seven months after he was
sent to deal with the problems exposed by the Abu
Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. His move was part of
a routine rotation, officials said. Gen Miller
previously commanded Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
http://www.guardian.co.uk
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