Word: qaeda
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Mosul remains at war. Although the conflict in most parts of Iraq has largely subsided - the uneasy peace punctured only sporadically by spurts of bloodshed - it isn't over in Mosul. Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups remain a force in this majority Sunni, ethnically and religiously mixed northern city, Iraq's third largest...
...meandering Tigris River cuts Mosul into a larger, tamer "green" eastern section and a violent and insecure "red" west, the heart of the crisis. Graffiti lauding the Islamic army of Iraq, a hard-line Sunni group loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda, are prevalent in many parts of west Mosul. Iraqi security forces have crossed out some of the writing on the wall, but it's proving harder to erase the insurgents and their support base. "I knew AQ [al-Qaeda] was a problem, but I didn't know to what extent," says Lieut. Colonel Thomas W. Cipolla, battalion commander...
...question is, Why? What is it about Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, that has sustained an insurgency that has largely (with the exception of northeastern Diyala province) died out in most of the country? Why has this city of some 2 million people become the site of al-Qaeda's last stand in Iraq...
...late. "We have arrested a lot, but there's a lot of corruption here in Iraq," says Colonel Moslet Ahmad Attiyeh, commander of the national police's Salah battalion. "The terrorists pay their way out and are released," he says, whereupon they join other insurgents displaced from al-Qaeda's former stronghold of Anbar and the still volatile Diyala who have found refuge in Mosul...
...destroy it, the population must actively turn against 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...