KurdistanObserver.com

Kurdish Fighters Help To Secure Mosul For Poll
By Ferry Biedermann in Mosul
 Jan 28,  2005

“This is the most dangerous city in the country, even more dangerous than Baghdad,” brag the young Kurdish soldiers, who nominally belong to the new Iraqi army. They were sent into the northern city of Mosul when Iraqi militants were on the verge of overrunning it in November. Now, they are charged with securing the city for Sunday's crucial national elections.

“All the terrorists from Falluja are here now,” says one of the Kurds, referring to the former stronghold of the Iraqi insurgency, captured by US marines in November.

The Iraqi authorities and their American allies seem to be determined to mount the polls everywhere in the country, even in the most violence-racked parts of the restive Sunni triangle. They have mounted an extensive security operation in Mosul where US special forces co-operate with units of battle-hardened Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

US forces rely heavily on the Kurdish fighters, brought in from the northern Kurdish region, since locally based units buckled under the attacks of the insurgents last year. The routing of the police force and the guards that were based in the city “was not all that negative”, said a US senior officer who has an intimate knowledge of Mosul.

He said the US forces had long before realised that the local recruits were unreliable but had been unable to replace them with Kurds because of objections by local leaders who were loath to upset the delicate ethnic balance in the town, which is partly Arab and partly Kurdish.

The fiasco in November was enough to cancel out the political objections to the Kurdish militia presence, and now Kurds control all the important security positions in Mosul.

That may have helped the security situation, but risks exacerbating a simmering ethnic problem between Kurds and Arabs, both of whom claim Mosul as a homeland.

General Muzaffer Derki, commander of a mainly Kurdish brigade of Iraqi army troops, summed up the feelings of many of his Kurdish compatriots: “The Arabs have to be made to behave by force, otherwise they will try to kill you,” he said.

The bright yellow and orange fireball that hit a passing convoy of the Kurdish 104th battalion, just days before the elections, served as a stark reminder that the insurgents are keeping up the pressure. The column of Kurdish soldiers in pick-up trucks had been on a mission to help secure polling places when they were ambushed on one of the main roads leading into the city.

Gen Derki jumped out of his badly shaken vehicle and marched to a little knoll where he watched the action unroll moments after the blast. He analysed the situation: “Standard ambush. They blow up a car by the side of the road and start shooting from a distance.” The bullets whizzed by as the Peshmerga responded with heavy machine guns that were mounted on the pick-up trucks. The blast left two soldiers dead and four gravely injured.