Word: mosul
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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has vowed to wage a "decisive battle" against insurgents in Mosul, which U.S. and Iraqi officials say is their last urban haven. But U.S. forces trying to stamp out insurgent networks in that city lack a major boon the surge effort has had elsewhere in Iraq over the past year: Local volunteer fighters...
...Michael Bills, the commander for U.S. forces in Mosul, has ruled out using so-called Concerned Local Citizens (CLC), bands of irregulars working alongside American and Iraqi troops in parts of Baghdad, Anbar Province and other areas of Iraq. "You got such a melting pot it's difficult to even fathom trying to do a CLC up here," Bills said of the Mosul area, where the population is complex mix of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups. The territory around Mosul has long been home to Kurds, Sunnis, Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis and Turkmens. Bills fears any efforts to organize...
...absence in Mosul of local volunteers, who are typically paid about $300 per month by U.S. forces elsewhere in Iraq, means American troops have more difficulty finding insurgents in the population. One of the most valuable things such fighters brought to the table over the past year across Iraq is a knowledge of who exactly the insurgents in their areas were. U.S. military officials estimate that roughly 300 hard-core fighters operate in Mosul, chiefly on the predominately Sunnni west side of the city. Attacks there are 50% higher than elsewhere in Mosul, according to Lt. Col. Michael Simmering...
...hoping Iraqi security forces are able to accomplish on their own what volunteer fighters have against the insurgency in places like Anbar Province, where a confederation of tribesmen turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and began fighting alongside U.S. troops. An estimated 9,000 Iraqi army troops are in Mosul working with some 1,400 American soldiers. Additionally, about 9,000 Iraqi police are in the city as well. But so far Iraqi security forces have yet to make a significant display of force in Mosul...
...with whom ethnic Turks share a distant Central Asian past and little else.) More recently, Turkey has demanded that Iraq's Kurds rid northern Iraq of the PKK, a job that the government-sanctioned Kurdish peshmerga militias are unable to do. The peshmerga are currently overstretched in Baghdad and Mosul trying to keep Arab insurgents from entering Kurdistan. (Iraqi Kurds tried to expel the PKK in the 1990's, but, like the Turkish army, they failed...