Word: mosul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Read "In Mosul, Iraq's Insurgency Refuses to be Tamed...
...second floor of what was once a school in east Mosul, an Iraqi Army medic stuck his chin out a hallway window and shaved over the courtyard. On either side of him in the dingy hallway light, detainees sat facing the wall, blankets cast over their heads. The Iraqi Army had brought them in on a tip from a man they caught with bomb making materials, and a U.S. Army platoon had just arrived. As the medic flicked his razor and turned his small mirror, the American soldiers stood the detainees up one by one, scanned their retinas, took their...
...translator is called Ricky, but this is not his name. None of the mostly Kurdish interpreters for the U.S. military in Mosul use their real names. Tagged on their standard issue camo shirts, Abdul becomes Mark, or Pablo, or Bill. Ricky chain-smokes and sweats heavily; earlier that day he had shown me the ugly marks on his back and arms that, he said, were scars from electrical wire torture by Saddam Hussein's security forces. They tortured him, he said, because his brother was a member of Kurdish intelligence. He tells me that because of what the Americans...
Trust is a frequent topic of conversation here in Mosul. On February 24, men in Iraqi police uniforms opened fire on four of the American soldiers they were supposed to be working with, wounding them and killing their interpreter. This, however, was seen as an exception. From privates to colonels, U.S. soldiers agree that the Iraqi Security Forces have improved and try to trust them - though members of the national army significantly more than the local police...
...biggest issue is the fight for the oil beneath Kirkuk, to the southwest, but even in Mosul, a Kurdish Commander in the Iraqi army expressed deep concerns. "Tomorrow," Col. Hazar, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi Army 5th Battalion told me, "if [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki transferred an Arab battalion up here, then we could not trust these people because they would use violence against us." (See a video on Iraq, six years after the U.S. invasion...