Word: mosul
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...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...
...little surprised to hear this from Col. Hazar. I had spent the day walking through the Colonel's area of operations, in the mixed Arab-Kurdish (though mostly Kurdish) towns of Karach and Machmour, south of Mosul. Everyone I spoke with who was even remotely connected to the military or government assured me, at least to start, that in these areas, Arabs and Kurds were like brothers and had lived together for hundreds of years. "The problems are government problems," said Saber Sharif Ahmed, a Kurdish primary school teacher, before introducing me to the local secondary school teacher...
...type of people whom Rasheed and Capt. Afar told me they were worried about - Sunni Nationalists, members of the former regime, officers in the Iraqi Army - also told me that they and the Peshmerga are unified. "We are one army," Col. Ali of east Mosul's 1st Brigade told me. "But," he added, in contradiction, "the Pesh is a militia...