JO Magazine

Mosul is a devastated city. On its restive east side, soldiers still man bleak outposts, crouched behind machine guns and scarred blast shields, fingers on triggers.

Words and photography by Phil Sands / Makoto.

SOME PARTS OF IRAQ are now largely peaceful, and have seen progress on reconstruction and economic revival—however faltering it may be. Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, is not one of those places. It’s more a war zone than a post-war zone.

According to US military records, violence there has declined. In September 2008 there were 287 reported attacks; by September 2009 that number was 121, down from an average of 10 attacks per day to four. But despite the drop, Mosul remains a lethally dangerous city, described by senior US military commanders at the end of 2009 as the “heart of the insurgency.”

A typical week’s worth of violence might include assassinations, gun battles on the street, roadside bombings, drive-by shootings and kidnappings.

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Since June 30, American troops have been formally pulled out of the urban center, but their sprawling base at Mosul airport is actually within city limits, and they still conduct almost daily street patrols to check on aid projects. They move in heavily armored convoys and take a pair of attack helicopters for protection with them when they go.

Mosul’s police force is 8,000 men short of full strength, and despite being reinforced by a unit of heavily armed paramilitary federal police from Baghdad, it operates only on the west side of the city. The east side is too dangerous.

In October 2009, Iraqi security forces carried out the latest in a series of major operations designed to break the lingering hold militants have had over the city. They arrested 150 suspects. Such large sweeps were by that time unheard of in other parts of the country, where the war had moved into a different, lower level phase. Mosul, however, has been left behind.

THE ONGOING HIGH LEVELS of violence are in large part a consequence of Arab-Kurdish 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 the Kurdish autonomous region and Iraq proper. That border cuts through Ninewah province, and the divide has all but choked Mosul, the provincial capital.

Between 2005 and 2009, Ninewah was run by a Kurdish administration that was essentially handed power when the Sunni Arab majority decided 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 sympathizers.

The situation was exacerbated by Mosul’s particular character: it’s 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 thereby address an underlying cause of instability. The ballot of January 2009 certainly rebalanced the provincial council, but, following a bitter and divisive campaign between Arab and Kurdish groups, it failed to yield a representative body.

Atheel Al Najafi, head of the Arab nationalist Al Hadba party, won the vote, became governor and his coalition exercised its constitutional right to choose who would fill the four other 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 and 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 recognize 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 Najafi our conditions for cooperation and we have heard nothing from him since. There has been no dialogue, no reconciliation.”
The Ninewah Brotherhood demanded at least two of the principle council posts and, crucially, that peshmerga forces—

the Kurdish army which answers to the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil, not to Baghdad—be allowed to stay in their current positions. Ninewah’s new governing parties consider the peshmerga an illegal militia and have insisted it be withdrawn to its pre-2003 invasion boundary, far north of where it is currently stationed.

“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, Kurdish and 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 recognize 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, corruption is rife and rule of law largely non-existent.

Colonel Gary Volesky, commander of US military forces in Mosul in 2009, insisted advances were being made, and that progress 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 June 30, 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 glide path to solving the harder issues.”

But the issues are complex and multi-layered, defying simple solutions 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 neighbors 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 at the epicenter of a destructive three-way tug of war in which no party has shown much willingness to compromise in order to reach a peaceful resolution.