Mosul: a city still at war

The first week of November was fairly typical for reported violence in Mosul.

Sun 1st Nov - a car bomb injured three civilians; gunmen killed a municipal employee.

Mon 2nd Nov - a civilian working for a cellphone firm shot and killed in front of his house.

Tue 3rd Nov - a civilian killed, two others wounded by a roadside bomb; gunmen shot at and wounded a judge near his house; two civilians wounded by mortar shells landing in downtown Mosul.

Wed 4th Nov - man killed and three others arrested by US forces in a joint raid with Iraqi police; a police patrol found two dead bodies in the Suq al Maash neighborhood.

Thu 5 Nov - a roadside bomb killed a police officer and injured three others.

0Fri 6 Nov - three police and two civilians injured by a blast; a bomb left in a plastic bag killed one policeman.

Sat 7 Nov – attackers using machine guns shot and killed a policeman in down town Mosul, during the afternoon.

Continued high levels of violence are in large part a consequence of Arab-Kurd tensions, with both groups vying for control of large swathes of oil-rich territory. Kirkuk, 150km to the south east of Mosul, is the focal point but the disputed areas run the length of the border between Kurdish and Arab Iraq. They also split Ninewah province and have choked Mosul, the provincial capital.

Between 2005 and 2009, Ninewah was run under a Kurdish administration that was gifted power by the Sunni Arab majority’s decision to boycott elections. With the bulk of the population disenfranchised and ill-served by the provincial government, Arab insurgent groups had little trouble finding recruits and sympathisers.

The situation was exacerbated by Mosul’s particular character; it is a conservative Sunni Islamic city as well as being home to senior Baath party members and officers from the old Iraqi army. Hard line Islamic groups and ranking former regime members all had reasons to oppose the US-led occupation, the new Iraqi authorities in Baghdad and the powerful Kurdistan Regional Government.

As the American military and Iraqi government struggled to establish some semblance of control over the city, they clung to the hope that provincial elections would solve the problem of Arab under-representation and, therefore, address an underlying cause of instability. The ballot of January 2009 certainly rebalanced the council but, following a bitter and divisive campaign between Arab and Kurdish groups, it failed to solve the major political problems.

Atheel al Najafi, head of the Arab nationalist ’al Hadba’ list, won the vote, became governor and his coalition exercised its constitutional right to choose who would fill the other four most influential positions on the provincial council. The opposition Ninewah Brotherhood List, the pro-Kurdish alliance, was not given any of the key posts, despite its strong showing in the polls. Of the 37 council seats, al Hadba took 19, the Ninewah Brotherhood list 12, with the remaining six going to smaller parties.

The Kurdish bloc saw al Hadba’s victory and refusal to share any power as a return to a Baathist style Arab chauvinism. When the provincial council convened for the first time after the elections, the meeting lasted less than five minutes, with the Kurdish group walking out. They have since boycotted the council, refusing to recognise its authority. In the space of a few months, Ninewah’s provincial council lurched from having no real Arab representation to having no real Kurdish representation.

“People voted democratically and parties that did well were given no positions in the provincial government, which means all of those voters are being ignored,” said Dahsin Sabo, council leader in Bashiqah, one of the 16 districts involved in the Ninewah boycott. “We have told [Atheel] Najafi our conditions for cooperation and we have heard nothing from him since. There has been no dialogue, no reconciliation.”

The Ninewah Brotherhood List demanded at least two of the principle council posts and, crucially, that Peshmerga forces — the Kurdish army which answers to the Kurd’s regional government in Erbil not to Baghdad — be allowed to stay in their current positions, far south of where they were before the US led invasion of 2003. Ninewah’s new governing parties consider the Peshmerga an illegal militia and have insisted it be withdrawn to its pre war boundary.

“The Kurds are powerful and they are trying to seize these territories that are not theirs,” said Bassim Yacob Jarjo, mayor of Tal Keyef, a mixed Arab-Kurd-Christian town on the northern edge of Mosul. “For the last six years the Kurds controlled Ninewah because they won the elections. They won legally and we had to accept that. This time Najafi won the election and the Kurds are refusing to recognise it. If you believe in democracy, you have to respect the results.”

Ordinary residents claim they are paying the price for the struggle and lack of unity; progress on security has been limited, the economy is in tatters, there is widespread poverty, corruption is rife and rule of law largely non-existent. In addition, the Mosul dam, built upstream of the city on the Tigris River by Saddam Hussein’s regime, is an engineering disaster. The foundations, constructed on water-soluble gypsum rock, are unstable and require continual reinforcement. Experts warn that if the dam were to break, Mosul would be destroyed by a tidal wave of water and concrete which would also devastate Baghdad, 500km further south.

Colonel Gary Volesky, commander of US military forces in Mosul in 2009, insisted progress was being made, and that it would continue. “I was here for the 2005 elections and everyone was saying Iraq couldn’t do that successfully and they did it,” he said. “Then they predicted Ninewah would burn at the last elections, and the election was very successful, people voted and they have a legitimate credible government. When we pulled out [of the cities] on 30th June, some people said the problems were going to start, but they did not. The national elections [scheduled for January 2010] are my focus now. After those, you will see these problems are dealt with. That’s a big one. After the election I think you will see Iraq is on the path to solving the harder issues.”

Abdul Rahman, a Mosul police officer who fled the city after his brother was murdered, said he doubted he would ever return, predicting a bleak future for the city he grew up in. “It’s not just the violence, corruption is also choking Iraq everywhere,” he said, on condition his full name not be revealed out of fear of further retribution. “There’s corruption at every level, the politicians are the worst. They are all stealing money, they sit around talking, they’ve got their personal security detail so they’re safe. And there are people out here, there are children, with no shoes, there are children who have never seen a toy. It’s disgusting.”

The problems are complex and multi-layed, defying simple solution and perhaps defying any solution at all. Mosul’s Arab-Kurd problems are part of a national, regional and international dispute, with Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbours alarmed by Kurdish nationalism and with the Kurds determined to push their historic territorial claims. In addition Mosul’s powerful Sunni Arab majority is anything but friendly with the Shiite dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad. It puts Mosul in the epicentre of a destructive three way tug of war, Kurd vs Baghdad vs Mosul’s Sunni Arabs, in which no party has shown much willingness to compromise in order to reach a peaceful resolution.