Word: mosul
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...said. "Even when they are being friendly to you." Non-Kurdish Iraqis, for their part, resent being treated as second-class citizens in Kurdish Iraq. "Why do I need permission to live in my own country?" said Walaa Matti, an Assyrian Christian who recently fled his home in Mosul and now works in the business center of a hotel in Erbil. "I'm Iraqi and this is my country, but I feel like a stranger...
...minority without a militia of their own, Iraqi Christians have been persecuted by both Shi'a and Sunni Muslim militias, and also by criminal gangs. "They think because we have liquor stores or live in nice neighborhoods we have more money," says Ghassan Mansou Chamoun, an Iraqi Christian from Mosul who arrived in Lebanon in December. The 36-year-old taxi driver left after receiving death threats from the Muslim family of one his passengers who died in an accident. "They wanted $50,000 or my head," he said...
...within weeks after he arrived, Petraeus staged elections for a city council and began to disburse funds to clean schools, reopen factories, fix potholes and establish recreation programs. He was, in effect, the mayor of Mosul. The tactics Petraeus used were well known to a tiny cadre of military intellectuals in the Pentagon: they were classic counterinsurgency methods, and they were scorned by most of the brass (and by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld), who thought that nation building was a job for social workers, not soldiers. Even though counterinsurgency seemed to be working in Mosul, the Pentagon wasn...
...January 2004, Rumsfeld replaced the 101st Airborne in Mosul with a Stryker Brigade, one of his prized innovations. Instead of patrolling the streets on foot, the Strykers--about 5,000 strong, one-quarter the number of troops that Petraeus had at his disposal--dashed about in high-tech armored vehicles. They didn't do any of the local governance that Petraeus had done. They were occupiers, not builders, and put Iraqis in control of civic order. Within months, Mosul descended into chaos. "You win this thing with boots on the ground," a Stryker Brigade officer told a Knight-Ridder reporter...
...longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...