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Baghdad -- Gunmen battled U.S. and Iraqi troops
around five major bridges across the Tigris River in
the northern provincial capital of Mosul on
Thursday, capping a week of mounting violence that
has some local officials worried Iraq's third
largest city is becoming another Fallujah.
"The same terrorists who are in Fallujah are coming
to Mosul," said Kosrat Rasool Ali, a prominent
leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which
controls the eastern half of the pro-U.S. autonomous
Kurdish region. "They are reorganizing themselves;
they are coordinating with the other groups. "
Mosul, at one time a postwar model for U.S.
occupation, has seen innumerable roadside blasts,
car bombs, assassination attempts against local
officials and drive-by shootings at U.S. troops and
Iraqi forces in recent months. But violence
escalated dramatically after the U.S. ground assault
on Fallujah began Sunday night.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed Tuesday in a mortar
attack on a nearby base.
On Wednesday, Mosul authorities imposed an
indefinite curfew, closed bridges and public
buildings after gunmen attacked a police station and
killed three officers. An Iraqi national guardsman
died, an unnamed foreigner working for a private
security company was killed in an assault on a U.S.
military convoy, and a Turkish truck driver was
killed and his rig burned outside town.
On Thursday, masked gunmen roamed the streets,
setting police cars on fire, ransacking five police
stations and looting the buildings of weapons,
ammunition and body armor, witnesses said.
Saadi Ahmed, a senior member of the pro-U.S.
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said some Mosul police
officers turned their stations over to the
attackers. "The internal security forces ... are a
failure and are ineffective because some of them are
cooperating with the terrorists," Ahmed said.
U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Angela Bowman
rejected claims by some residents that parts of
Mosul had fallen under insurgent control, saying
that guerrillas "have not taken any parts of the
city. The operations are still ongoing and probably
will be for some time until we fully secure the
city."
Local officials and politicians fear that the
ethnically diverse city of 2.5 million could become
the next high-profile battlefield and that the
fighting could spill over into other areas of
northern Iraq, possibly destabilizing northern oil
fields and the three-province Kurdish enclave.
"Mosul is a big threat," said a senior security
official in the Kurdish city of Irbil, about 55
miles west of Mosul, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. "It is going to be the second Fallujah,
but even worse."
U.S. analysts say the comparison with the insurgency
in the Sunni triangle city may be overblown.
"I don't think Mosul will play the same role, in
large part because of the significant number of
Kurds and Turkomans who have little interest in
coddling a Sunni insurgency," said Steven Metz,
director of research at the U. S. Army War College's
Strategic Studies Institute.
Unlike the ethnically homogenous cities of the Sunni
triangle -- Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi -- Mosul is
in a Kurdish area, though with an Arab majority that
is both Shiite and Sunni. There are also Assyrian
Christians, Nestorian Christians, Armenians and
Turkomans.
After falling into chaos immediately after the
U.S.-led invasion last year, Mosul became relatively
peaceful under the control of Lt. Gen. David
Petreaus and the U.S. Army's 20,000-strong 101st
Airborne Division. In February, the 101st was
replaced by the 8,500-soldier Stryker Brigade of the
25th Infantry Division, one of the most
technologically sophisticated units in the U.S.
military.
Kurdish officials say that the city has since become
a magnet for foreign fighters entering Iraq from
Syria and that attacks on Christians and Kurds have
increased, prompting members of various minority
communities to flee. Last month, Iraqi media
reported militant groups posted flyers all over the
city warning residents not to cooperate with U.S.
and Iraqi government authorities. There were also
reports of arms being stored in local mosques.
Tahir Khalaf al-Bakaa, Iraq's minister of higher
education, says militant Islamic enforcers now roam
throughout the city, ordering non-Muslim women to
wear scarves. "This is becoming a big problem in
Mosul," he said. "We are walking on minefields."
Some local Iraqis accuse U.S.-led forces of causing
the trouble by entering homes and mosques, harassing
religious figures and making sweeping arrests. "We
can't keep quiet about what the occupation forces
are doing to provoke Mosul," said Talaat al-Wazaan,
leader of the Mosul-based nationalist Iraqi Party.
However, Kurdish officials say between 100 and 250
members of Ansar al- Islam, a Kurdish fundamentalist
group holed up in surrounding mountains that is said
to have ties to al Qaeda, have infiltrated the once
prosperous, oil- rich city.
The insurgents have also penetrated Mosul's security
forces, according to Dana Ahmad Majid, regional
director of Asayesh, the intelligence service in the
Kurdish province of Sulaymaniya.
"There were many mistakes in the recruitment of
police and Iraqi national guard," he said. "Many of
them are former Saddam (Hussein) loyalists."
As a result, Iraqi officials have dispatched special
police units to hunt down infiltrators and militants
inside and outside the city.
"The same steps for Fallujah also apply to Mosul,"
interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said two weeks
ago. "The special police forces have arrived. ...
Peace needs to be brought back to Mosul, and we will
bring peace to Mosul."
Staff reporter Matthew Stannard in San Francisco,
correspondent Delphine Minoui in Iraq and Chronicle
news services contributed to this report.
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