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Mosul
- Khalid Moustafa's family has no idea who
killed him, or why. Moustafa, a Kurd, was a yogurt
seller and taxi driver, the husband of an Arab woman
and the father of five children, with a sixth on the
way. He was found in pieces, his head near his home,
his body left by a highway. "Mosul is a butchery,"
says the victim's father, asking that his name be
withheld to protect the rest of his family.
Moustafa's murder is part of a recent wave of
killings that threatens to turn this multiethnic,
Arab-dominated northern gateway city into the next
Fallujah, as areas of the city are slipping out of
the control of U.S. forces and the Iraqi government.
Life still appears normal in many parts of Mosul,
especially in the Kurdish neighborhoods on the
eastern side of the Tigris River. Stores are open,
traffic is thick and the Iraqi National Guard
patrols the streets. But much of Mosul has become an
incubator for regional terrorist groups like Ansar
al-Islam, the Kurdish fundamentalists, and for
foreign fighters crossing the still unsecured border
from Syria, according to U.S. and Iraqi security
officials. "Many kinds of criminals and terrorists
come into Mosul from Syria. It's like the Super Bowl
for them," says Salim Kako, a top official of the
Assyrian Democratic Movement, which represents many
Christians in Mosul. The outsiders have mixed with
Mosul's homegrown fundamentalist Islamic opposition
and a potent Baathist resistance fueled by the
city's large number of unemployed soldiers. This
stew of local and outside insurgents is stepping up
attacks on American and Iraqi security forces -- and
anyone suspected of collaborating with them. Week
after week, car bombings, improvised explosives and
shootings take a steady toll of Iraqi National Guard
and U.S. personnel
The insurgents hope to pull Mosul apart by targeting
those people best-placed to help unify it. Threats
and assassinations often target the city's
professional classes, workers in its economically
vital oil industry and known political moderates.
"Anyone who advocates freedom and democracy is
considered to be publicly for America and a target,"
says Rooa al-Zrary, a Mosul journalist whose father,
the editor of a moderate newspaper, was murdered
last year. Doctors are fleeing, finding work in
Erbil. "The situation is bad and getting worse,"
says a surgeon at Salaam Hospital, the city's
largest. Adds a colleague: "We feel like there are
eyes watching everyone, and that the resistance is
growing stronger every day." At Mosul University,
teaching is now a dangerous occupation. The dean of
the college of law was found dead outside her home,
along with her husband. And three professors have
been murdered, including the head of the political
science and the translation departments.
Mosul's cosmopolitan character is also under attack.
"The mosaic of Mosul is a miniature Iraq: Arabs,
Kurds, Turkomans, Assyrian Christians, Nestorian
Christians, Muslim Sunnis, Muslim Shi?ites, Yezidis
and Armenians," says Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Mosul
chief of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of
Kurdish Iraq's two governing parties. By attacking
this mosaic, he says, "the Syrians and the
resistance are trying to create anarchy." Minority
groups viewed as sympathetic to the Americans are
particularly vulnerable. A Christian church was
bombed in early August, and Christians have been
among those murdered. Pire says he has survived
several assassination attempts.
Tal Afar, a city 30 miles west of Mosul populated
almost entirely by Iraqi Turkoman, was overrun by
terrorist groups this summer. In early September,
the U.S. Army laid siege to the town and the ensuing
two-week battle was so fierce that the Turkish
government complained that Americans were killing
innocent Turkoman civilians. Many Mosul residents
worry that Tal Afar was a dry run for their city.
The sad irony is that Mosul had once been a postwar
model for U.S. involvement in Iraq. From April 2003
until last February, the city was under the command
of the 101st Airborne Division, led by Lieut.
General David Petraeus, who tried to be sensitive to
local concerns. Several residents fondly recall
particular soldiers by name. "Tell Mr. Anderson of
the 101st Airborne that a Moslawi girl salutes him,"
says a schoolteacher. The 101st devoted itself to
economic-development projects, including restarting
a cement factory that had been one of the city's
biggest employers. These days the local economy has
stalled as foreign companies have fled. According to
Pire, about 600,000 breadwinners are unemployed in a
city of somewhere between 2.6 million and 3 million
people.
The 20,000-strong 101st is gone, replaced last
February by the 8,700 soldiers of Task Force
Olympia, a multinational brigade of coalition
troops. Although they include a large number of U.S.
National Guard reservists, American soldiers have
largely taken a backseat to the Iraqi National
Guard. So far, as in the rest of Iraq, the
performance of these new units has been mixed. "The
current invisibility of American soldiers has made
people happier. People feel more comfortable with
Iraqi soldiers," says Dindar Doskar, head of the
Mosul office of the Kurdish Islamic Union (KIU).
"But there are not enough Iraqi soldiers and police,
and the terrorists have better weapons." Because of
that threat, politicians in Mosul say the nationwide
elections scheduled for January are likely to be
turbulent there. "Who is going to vote under these
conditions?" asks the KIU's Doskar. The offices of
the major political parties have already been
attacked. Predicts Doskar: "There will be car bombs
at voting stations just like there are car bombs at
police-recruiting stations." And perhaps heads left
on the sidewalks to give awful testimony to Mosul's
deepening crisis.
Time Magazine Online
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