Word: mosul
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...wants to strengthen Baghdad's hand at the expense of Iraq's 18 provinces, including Kurdistan - the semiautonomous three-province Kurdish region in the north - much to the chagrin of the federalist-minded Kurds. At the provincial level, newly empowered hard-line Sunni groups like al-Hadba in Mosul, Nineveh's capital, are preparing to expand their political clout. (See a TIME photographer's diary of the Iraq conflict...
While lingering violence in Mosul and Diyala province remains a challenge, the real battle - the one that will define what kind of Iraq emerges as the U.S. withdraws its troops in the next two years - has barely begun. The fundamental problems are many; they are intrasectarian, regional and local, Arab vs. Kurd. On the sixth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq seems to have moved away from all-out war into a more complicated set of realities - where both politics and violence are part of the equation, where the answers to the many what-ifs of its future hold both promise...
...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...
...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...