Word: mosul
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...killed him, or why. Moustafa, a Kurd, was a yogurt seller and taxi driver, the husband of an Arab woman and the father of five children, with a sixth on the way. He was found in pieces, his head near his home, his body left by a highway. "Mosul is a butchery," says the victim's father, asking that his name be withheld to protect the rest of his family...
...Life still appears normal in many parts of Mosul, especially in the Kurdish neighborhoods on the eastern side of the Tigris River. Stores are open, traffic is thick and the Iraqi National Guard patrols the streets. But much of Mosul has become an incubator for regional terrorist groups like Ansar al-Islam, the Kurdish fundamentalists, and for foreign fighters crossing the still unsecured border from Syria, according to U.S. and Iraqi security officials. "Many kinds of criminals and terrorists come into Mosul from Syria. It's like the Super Bowl for them," says Salim Kako, a top official...
...insurgents hope to pull Mosul apart by targeting those people best-placed to help unify it. Threats and assassinations often target the city's professional classes, workers in its economically vital oil industry and known political moderates. "Anyone who advocates freedom and democracy is considered to be publicly for America and a target," says Rooa al-Zrary, a Mosul journalist whose father, the editor of a moderate newspaper, was murdered last year. Doctors are fleeing, finding work in Erbil. "The situation is bad and getting worse," says a surgeon at Salaam Hospital, the city's largest. Adds a colleague...
...Mosul's cosmopolitan character is also under attack. "The mosaic of Mosul is a miniature Iraq: Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Assyrian Christians, Nestorian Christians, Muslim Sunnis, Muslim Shi?ites, Yezidis and Armenians," says Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Mosul chief of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of Kurdish Iraq's two governing parties. By attacking this mosaic, he says, "the Syrians and the resistance are trying to create anarchy." Minority groups viewed as sympathetic to the Americans are particularly vulnerable. A Christian church was bombed in early August, and Christians have been among those murdered. Pire says he has survived several...
...Afar, a city 30 miles west of Mosul populated almost entirely by Iraqi Turkoman, was overrun by terrorist groups this summer. In early September, the U.S. Army laid siege to the town and the ensuing two-week battle was so fierce that the Turkish government complained that Americans were killing innocent Turkoman civilians. Many Mosul residents worry that Tal Afar was a dry run for their city...