Word: mosul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...population must also feel secure enough to know that if they turn in an insurgent, they won't face revenge attacks. "You can go kill and capture [insurgents] all you want; it doesn't matter. The people have got to turn against them, and they haven't yet in Mosul because they're intimidated," Brown says. "And I don't blame them...
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...
...boots on the ground, coupled with a lack of basic services such as electricity and water, high unemployment and a disenfranchised Sunni population that until recently was governed by members of the minority Kurdish population, made the city kindling for the insurgency. But things are changing. American troops in Mosul have doubled over the past several months, according to Col. Gary Volesky, brigade commander of the 3rd Heavy Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. January's provincial polls also brought a Sunni party, Al-Hadba, to power, a development that is expected to lessen some elements of the insurgents' support base...
...subversive elements within it, and either fight or flush them out in the same way that Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar switched sides and allied with the Americans against al-Qaeda in their province, a movement known as the Sahwa. That hasn't happened yet, General Brown says, because Mosul's diverse makeup has proved difficult to foster such a movement. The Anbar Sahwa fell into line behind tribal sheiks, whose word is law, but Nineveh is not exclusively a tribal society...
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...