IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn
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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.
I 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