Word: iraqi
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...among Shi'ite parties for supremacy within their community as well as a parallel intra-Sunni battle. Elections are now playing a role in this political drama. January's provincial polls, for example, dealt a devastating blow to religious and federalist-minded parties like the Shi'ite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. They were firmly repudiated in favor of secular, nationalist groups. But will this resurgent nationalism carry through to the more important parliamentary elections slated for December? And if so, what will a reordered Iraqi political scene mean for future U.S. ties to Iraq? Will sharpened intrasectarian battles be fought...
Major General Hassan Kareem Abbas, commander of the Nineveh Operations Command, which oversees the province's Iraqi police, national police and army units, says there are several factors to blame. First of all, he says, the lack of political accord among the province's diverse population as well as tensions with the neighboring region of Kurdistan, which lays claim to Nineveh's oil-rich city of Kirkuk, have fostered an environment of political uncertainty. (See 10 ideas changing the world right...
Then there is the Syria connection. Saddam Hussein recruited many of his high-ranking Baath Party members and army generals from Mosul's élite Sunni families, many of whom sought refuge in Syria after the 2003 U.S. invasion and the fall of the dictator. According to several Iraqi generals from the national police and the army, some of these die-hard Saddam loyalists have been funneling funds and fighters - both foreign and Iraqi - across the 185-mile Syrian border with Nineveh...
American commanders in Mosul agree that insurgents unseated from elsewhere in Iraq have followed a "path of least resistance" to this northern city. "There were 28 U.S. battalions in Baghdad during the surge as well as lots of Iraqi battalions. Up here there was one battalion," says Brigadier General Robert B. Brown, deputy commander of the 25th Infantry Division. "So where are [the insurgents] gonna...
Last week a joint U.S. and Iraqi military operation was launched in southwest Mosul as part of the province-wide Operation Nineveh Resolve, aimed at rooting out insurgents and finding weapons caches. Platoons fanned out along rubbish-strewn streets as Blackhawk helicopters circled overhead to provide support. But the residents of Mosul have experienced this type of neighborhood "clearing" operation many times before. "We've never been able to really hold the gains, and so these people have seen clearance after clearance, after clearance," says Colonel Volesky. And so Mosul will see such operations again and again, hoping that something...