12 April 2007
UNDER SIEGE
"If you go in the streets by yourself, you'll be dead in 15 minutes," says Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city. An able, confident man, he speaks from experience, having survived more assassination attempts than almost any political leader in Iraq. The one-hour car journey to Goran's office from the Kurdish capital, Arbil, underlines the dangers. He has sent guards, many of them his relatives, to pick me up from my hotel. They travel in slightly battered civilian cars, chosen to blend in with the rest of the traffic, wear civilian jackets and T-shirts, and keep their weapons concealed.
We drive at great speed across the Greater Zaab river, swollen with flood water, into the province of Nineveh, of which the ancient city of Mosul is the capital. The majority of its 1.8 million people are Sunni Arabs and one third are Kurds, along with 25,000 Christians. Arabs and Kurds have been fighting for control of the city for four years. Every day brings its harvest of dead. "Five Kurds were killed here yesterday," says one of the guards dolefully.
The weapon of choice in Mosul these days is the vehicle-borne suicide bomb. We pass the headquarters of the PUK, one of the two main Kurdish parties, where 19 people were killed by just such a bomb last year. I can see where a second suicide driver targeted another PUK branch office close to the light blue dome of a mosque in March, killing a further three people and wounding 20.
The city is not as obviously dangerous as Baghdad, where whole districts are intermittently controlled by Sunni insurgents or Shia militiamen. At a quick glance there even appear to be reasons for optimism in Mosul, since there are plenty of relaxed-looking policemen patrolling in their blue and white cars and directing traffic.
But such signs are misleading as an indication of uncontested government authority. In Mosul, the police are mostly Arab, while the two Iraqi army divisions are largely Kurdish. Out of 20,000 police, Goran believes that half belong to or sympathise with the Sunni resistance. When Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death last November, one policeman stuck a picture of the former leader on his windscreen by way of protest. We drive quickly through the crumbling walls of ancient Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, and past a large mound, beneath which is the tomb of Jonah, who, having survived his unfortunate experience with the whale, was buried here. Traffic is lighter than I remember during my visit last year. This is good news from the point of view of safety, because we are unlikely to get caught in a traffic jam, where other drivers have time to notice that I am obviously a foreigner and that the guards are wearing civilian shirts but camouflage trousers.
Unfortunately, the reason why there are so few vehicles on the streets turns out to be bad news for the people of Mosul and Nineveh province. Syria has suspended supplies of fuel. As a result, the province is getting only 10 per cent of its overall fuel needs and 4 per cent of its normal supply of petrol. Food rations are no longer being delivered. Water and sewage, as well as hospitals, are affected.
We finally speed into Goran's heavily fortified headquarters, a former Baath party centre on the left bank of Tigris river taken over by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, of which he is head in Mosul. Its elaborate defences, high concrete walls and watchtowers, would do credit to a castle in a particularly disturbed part of medieval Europe. The sentries indicate to cars on a nearby roundabout that they are getting too close to the headquarters by firing bursts from their automatic rifles into the air.
Goran, though deputy governor, is a Kurd and more powerful than the Arab governor. He is very different from those politicians in Baghdad who never leave the Green Zone except to make numerous foreign trips, during which they exude ill-informed optimism about security. He has a clear vision of the strengths and weaknesses of the government's position in Mosul. He points out that, unlike Baghdad and the provinces of central Iraq, insurgents do not permanently control any single area. His claim that government security forces have arrested many "terrorists" is confirmed by other security sources.
The difference between Mosul and Baghdad is that in Mosul the government can at least rely on the Kurdish community as supporters. In the capital, government has nobody on whose loyalty it can wholly depend. On 23 March, the deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, was badly injured by a bomber who got near him with the connivance of his own bodyguards. The government's only response was to consider hiring another, non-Iraqi, security company.
Goran admits that the insurgents have a sort of "shadow" government in Mosul that competes with the real government. "There are eyes everywhere knowing what you do," he says. They visit hairdressers and beauty salons to make sure they give only "Islamic" haircuts. Many Kurds are fleeing the city because of assassinations and intimidation. Some 70,000 have already left. Kurdish students at Mosul university, one of the largest and previously among the most distinguished in Iraq, dare not stay.
Aside from wholly Kurdish units, the Iraqi government's own security forces are thoroughly infiltrated. This is true not just in Mosul but throughout Iraq. It is a crucial point that President Bush and Tony Blair never seem to understand when they explain that they are training and equipping some 265,000 police and soldiers in Iraq. The real problem for Washington and London is that most of these men are loyal to their own communities - Shia, Sunni or Kurdish-before they are loyal to the government in Baghdad.
Mosul has already seen examples of this. In November 2004, the city police force went home, effectively handing over control of Mosul to insurgents who captured 30 police stations and $41m (£20m) in arms. Things have improved since then, but possibly not by as much as the Iraqi government and the US would like to imagine. The police are not only Sunni Arabs. Many of them come from the powerful and numerous al-Juburi tribe. This makes it politically very difficult to fire or demote them.
It is not only the police whose loyalties are suspect. On 6 March, insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) movement- of which al-Qa’ida in Iraq is a part - stormed Badoush prison north-west of Mosul. They freed 68 prisoners, of whom 57 were non-Iraqis. It was the biggest jail-break in Iraq since the occupation started in 2003.
Goran cynically points out that there are supposedly 1,200 guards at Badoush, of whom 400 to 500 were present during the attack, but did nothing to halt it. He suspects that many of the guards, who get their orders not from him but from the Ministry of Justice in Baghdad, had colluded with the insurgents in the break-out. He suggests that the jail be moved to Basra or into Kurdistan for greater security.
It is allegiance, not training, equipment and numbers that determines the effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces. For instance, frontier guards on the border with Syria to the west of Mosul mostly come from the Sunni-Arab Shammar tribe. They are unlikely to be very effective because many of the insurgents and smugglers whom they are supposed to stop also belong to the Shammar, who live on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier.
I have always liked Mosul. It feels a more ancient city than Baghdad. I enjoyed climbing the ancient stone streets in the Christian quarter too narrow and rutted by carts over the centuries for any car to enter. Even today, from Goran's heavily defended KDP headquarters, there is a wonderful view across the shimmering Tigris towards the old city, with its elegant minarets, on the west side of the river.
I first visited Mosul in 1978 and saw the tourist sights. I spent a few days here in 1991 during the first Gulf War. But the day in the city I most vividly recall was 11 April 2003, when the Iraqi army collapsed and Kurdish forces poured in. It was a moment full of lessons for the future.
At first, there was a sense of jubilation as people realised that Saddam Hussein's iron rule was over. Even the looters had a cheery air. Scores of young men were breaking down the doors of the Central Bank building and reappearing, clutching great bundles of Iraqi dinars. A small yellow KDP flag floated from one end of the governor's office and an Iraqi flag from the other but looters were in charge.
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