Is the Iraqi-Kurd civil war starting in Mosul?

Posted on Mon, Apr. 14, 2003
Militias forming in Mosul
By Mark Mcdonald and Jonathan Landay
Knight Ridder News Service

MOSUL, Iraq - Fearful of marauding gangs of looters, thieves and arsonists, Arab residents in Iraq's third-largest city formed armed militias Sunday in a desperate attempt to protect their homes, shops and families.

In the nearby oil-production center of Kirkuk, there was a marked reduction in violence Sunday after two days of rampaging by Kurdish looters. But bloodshed between Arabs and Kurds flared in the countryside.

In one of the most serious confrontations, an unknown number of Kurdish looters and at least two Kurdish police officers were killed by Arabs in Hawija, 30 miles southwest of Kirkuk.

The Arabs also took 15 Kurdish police officers captive, said Feraydoon Abdul Qader, the interior minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a U.S.-backed Kurdish opposition group.

In Mosul, religious leaders acknowledged the need for neighborhood militias because of the wholesale breakdown of law and order in the city, but the clerics also appealed to residents to put down their weapons in favor of unarmed patrols and roadblocks.

"These people setting up their own private militias and checkpoints are childish and stupid," said Sheikh Badr Al-Hilali, director of Mosul's mosques and religious sites. "Most of them don't even know how to use a gun. They are performing a stage play that's a mockery of law and order. The allies have to stop this."

But the allies in Mosul -- a couple of hundred Green Berets and Marines -- are overwhelmed and overmatched. Mosul is a fractious, ethnically divided city of 2 million people, including large numbers of hard-core Baath Party members and Saddam Hussein loyalists who are angry over the fall of their government.

"We need thousands of soldiers to properly police this city," said a Kurdish political leader who is working with the U.S. contingent.

Many experts have warned that ethnic tensions kept in check by Saddam could explode in northern Iraq with the end of his iron-fisted rule.

One bright note occurred outside the Arab farming village of Shahriya, about 35 miles southwest of Kirkuk, with the arrival of a joint patrol of Kurdish police and Arab villagers.

A member of the Kurdish police, Tahir Mohammad Salih, said he wished his unit could "protect all Iraqi peoples so they can live safely and keep their lives and their property."

Salih is a native of Halabja, where 5,000 Kurds died in a 1988 chemical weapons attack by Saddam's forces.

"Because I am from Halabja, I don't want what happened in Halabja to happen again in Iraq," Salih said.

Some of the Arab villagers said the lawlessness and Kurd-Arab violence came abou because the Bush administration did not deploy enough American troops in the region.

"Americans cannot overthrow the government and then leave the area in this way because this will lead to chaos," said Mohammad Ahmad Hussein, a Shahriya villager. "It will lead to chaos and enmity between the two sides and is not good for the future."

U.S. troops tried to quell some of the chaos in Mosul, which has been wracked by three days of horrific Kurdish-Arab violence. About 70 people have been killed and countless numbers injured.

The city remained edgy, tense and dangerous over the weekend. Two Army troopers on a patrol late Saturday night were wounded by an unseen sniper.

Convoys of Green Berets, Marines and members of a new, U.S.-supervised squad of Free Iraqi Fighters made several swings through the city Sunday, large American flags flying high behind their Humvees. Children waved and shouted hello, although most of the men in the Arab neighborhoods looked on warily and unsmiling.

Nearly all municipal services -- water, power, police, sanitation -- have broken down since the Iraqi army meekly surrendered Thursday night. A frenzy of looting quickly ensued.