was fascinated by one determined man who was trying, unaided, to drag a vast and hideously ornate gold and purple sofa he had found in the governor's sanctum, down the stairs and into the street. He would go to one end of the sofa and laboriously move it a few feet. Then he would repeat the process at the other end. I kept running into the man in the course of the day as he doggedly moved his sofa across Mosul's main square towards his home. The mood began to change in the course of the morning. The hotels were on fire and men were breaking into the local museum. At first, people blamed criminals released by Saddam under an amnesty the previous year. Others wondered why the Americans had not arrived. The answer was they had only 2,000 men in the whole of northern Iraq and these had been sent to secure the Kirkuk oilfields. The Americans - and this was to be the pattern for the next four years - could not control Mosul without the Kurds. Iraqi nationalism was not entirely dead. I went looking for American troops and found some of them at a checkpoint on the outskirts. They had raised the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly, a man popped up from behind a wall nearby and vigorously waved an Iraqi flag. The soldiers, fearing he might lob a grenade, opened fire but he dodged down and escaped.
By evening, most of the Arab majority in Mosul had concluded that the problem was not criminals but Kurds. I went to the Republican hospital where Dr Ayad Ramadani, the hospital director, said: "The Kurdish militias are looting the city."
There was a frightening air of anarchy. As I spoke to the doctor there was a deafening chatter of a heavy machine-gun nearby. Some men had been trying to lift the body of a dead relative, wrapped in a white shroud, into the back of a pick-up. At the sound of the firing, the driver of the pick-up panicked and drove off, leaving the mourners shaking their fists at the departing vehicle.
Vigilantes began to appear and- again a sign for the future - they were organised by the local mosques. Rudimentary barricades made of rocks appeared in the streets. There was a growing feeling of rage among the Arabs of Mosul. I had gone to see whether I could stay with the Assyrian archbishop in the Christian quarter. When I got back to the car, our driver, Yusuf, normally a taciturn man, was looking shaken. He explained that a crowd had come out of a mosque while I was away. They noticed that our car had numberplates showing it came from Arbil in Kurdistan. They wanted to know what a Kurd was doing in their city and clearly suspected Yusuf of being a looter. He said: "One of them yelled, "Let's kill him and burn the car."Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed, but it was obvious that we had to get out of Mosul as fast as possible.
The Americans did make a serious effort to cope with the problems of Mosul. General David Petraeus, now overall US commander in Iraq, then commanded 20,000 men of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Mosul, during the first year of the occupation. He avoided many of the crass errors being made by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Baghdad.
Petraeus could see that he had to deal with a predominantly Sunni Arab city with a proud nationalist and military tradition. Nineveh province was full of ex-army and ex-security officers who needed to be conciliated. They would never love the occupation, but they might be persuaded not to join the armed resistance. Bremer dissolved the Iraqi armed forces - the symbol of Iraqi independence- and thus made a gift to the resistance of tens of thousands of young men with military training but no job. Petraeus tried to evade the ruinous consequences of de-Baathification by getting officers to sign a document renouncing the Baath party. On a wet day on a hilltop outside Mosul in January 2004, I watched as 2,243 former officers raised their right hands and solemnly renounced the Baath and all its works. There was no doubt about the officers' motives. They wanted jobs. Major Faiq Ahmed Abed, a grizzled veteran with 26 years' military service, had served in the Republican Guard but had not been paid since the previous April. "Since then, I have been selling my furniture to feed my children," he said.
Petraeus kept the returning Iraqi exiles, who were gaining power in Baghdad, at arm's length. Several had turned up in Mosul and politely suggested that they were willing to carry out any non-competitive contract the US military might like to put their way. Petraeus wanted to hold elections as quickly as possible to give the Iraqis he was cooperating with some legitimacy. When he left Mosul in early 2004, I asked him what was the most important advice he could give to his successor. He said, after reflecting for some moments, that it was, "not to align too closely with one ethnic group, political party, tribe, religious group or social element".
By the end of the year, the conciliatory policies pursued by Petraeus were in ruins. In November, during the US assault on Fallujah, the Mosul police force revolted to a man. So, too, had all the soldiers, aside from the Kurds, at the army base in the centre of town. US army and Kurdish units had to be rushed into the city to regain control. The Kurds had detested Petraeus because he had avoided aligning too closely with them. Today, there are two Iraqi army divisions, most of the soldiers Kurdish, and one US battalion in Mosul. After November 2004 the Americans in the city became, in the eyes of many Sunnis, one more tribe allied to the Kurds. The city today lives on its nerves. Bombings and assassinations are not as frequent as in Baghdad but enough to make life hideously insecure. A message from a professor at Mosul University, who did not want her name published, sent last November, conveys the grim flavour of life. "The condition here is worsening more and more," she writes. "My office at the college was in havoc by the shrapnel and huge storm of a huge explosion just in the early morning. If I were in my office I should have been torn to pieces.
"A suicidal explosion by a huge fuel vehicle took place at 7am targetting at a police centre. The area includes a paediatrics hospital, a neighbourhood, a filling station where a long line of waiting people (mostly the poor who cannot afford buying benzene from the black market). The casualties were mostly them, children at the hospital, a whole family who were by chance there and some officials going to their offices in the university. It was more horrible than one can imagine or describe."
The professor did not expect life in Mosul to get better and her pessimistic expectations have been fulfilled. For centuries, Mosul has been one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Middle East. Sadly, this is now ending. Kurds are in flight. So, too, are Christians. Fanatical Jihadi Islamists persecute them as being no different from US soldiers. When US soldiers were accused of damaging a mosque in a raid, two Christians churches in Mosul were blown up by way of retaliation.
The fighting is likely to get worse. Under article 140 of the Iraqi constitution passed by a referendum in 2005 - though Nineveh province voted against - there must be a referendum on joining the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by the end of 2007. The Kurds are determined to get back the lands from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. Above all, they want Kirkuk and its oilfields. The vote will be by district, so existing provinces, whose boundaries were gerrymandered by Sad-dam Hussein, will cease to exist. The Kurds expect large areas of eastern, northern and western Nineveh province will join the KRG, but not Mosul city, because it has an Arab majority. The Kurds are absolutely determined to get what they consider their rights after years of persecution, expulsion and genocide. They rightly think that they now have an historic opportunity to create a powerful near-independent state within Iraq: They are America's only effective allies in Iraq; they are powerful in Baghdad; the non-Kurdish parts of the Iraqi government are weak. Goran confirms that they may postpone the referendum for a short period, but not for long. He suspects that the province will split into two, one Kurdish and part of the KRG and the other Arab.
The history of Mosul over the past four years since the fall of Saddam Hussein has some lessons for resolving the conflict in Iraq in the long term. Many of the crass errors made in the first days of the occupation in Baghdad did not happen in Mosul. American and Kurdish commanders have often been able men. But the end result has been disastrously similar in both cities. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that Iraqi communities mean exactly what they say and will fight to get it. In Iraq, this means that the Kurds are going to recover their lost lands; the Sunni are going to get the Americans out and the Shia, as the majority, are determined to be the primary force in government.
Friday, 4 May 2007
DO NOT TRUST THE IRAQI POLICE
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