By Cernig
I've always found the official titles for military operations somewhat ridiculous, laden as they are with testosterone-heavy chest beating - as if a macho title to the latest operation will make anyone fight harder or console the wounded with the knowledge that they lost a limb for the Desert Storm or the Knight's Move. But the latest such cliched manouver in Iraq, the Iraqi Army's "Lion's Roar" offensive in and around Mosul, deserves some attention - not least because everyone locally understands the lion in question is definitely Persian.
For one thing, the Iraqi Interior Ministry just announced the capture of around 500 "suspected insurgents" in the first three days of the offensive. Either Al Qaeda's "last refuge" has a bigger insurgent presence than we were led to believe or the Iraqi Army are rounding up people and simply calling them insurgents. On previous experience, either is possible - but there are good reasons to believe the former.
This Mosul offensive has been ongoing since at least February 11th when 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces backed by helicopters and tanks were sent in to the city after an uptick in violence at the end of January which prompted protests from the provincial governor and city police chief that they were being left out on a limb by the central government. At the time, Iraqi officials spoke of "cleansing" Mosul of al Qaeda fighters and Maliki said the Iraqi Army would �finish the last battle with Al Qaeda, the gangs and the remnants of the past regime� - but the forces sent - when 3,000 additional troops had originally been promised - proved inadequate to the task.
We now know why the Iraqi government was being pasimonious in sending troops to Mosul, of course - they were needed for Maliki's electioneering-at-gunpoint confrontation with the Sadrist movement in Basra and then Baghdad.
Veteran journalist for the UK's Independent newspaper, Patrick Cockburn, is currently in Mosul and his experience compares unfavorably with that of Spencer Ackerman last March.
Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al Qaeda in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country's northern capital into a ghost town.
Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead yesterday by U.S. troops, who issued a statement saying the men were armed and one made "threatening movements".
Mosul, on the Tigris river, is inhabited by 1.4 million people, but has been sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al Qaeda began at 4am on Saturday. The operation is a critical part of an attempt to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.
The besieged city is now difficult to reach; we began the journey from the Kurdish capital Arbil in a convoy of white pick-up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some wearing black face masks, that were escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the city.
...I had been to Mosul down this road half a dozen times since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and on each occasion the military escort necessary to reach the city safely has grown bigger.
...Outside the police headquarters, the black vehicles of the Interior Ministry, each with a heavy machine gun and a yellow head of a tiger as an insignia on the doors, were drawn up in rows. American helicopters flew high overhead as well as drones for reconnaissance. There was the occasional burst of firing and bomb blast in the distance. The governor of Mosul, Dunaid Kashmoula, says the city "has come to be dominated by the leaders of al Qaeda as a result of the delay in the military operation" originally scheduled for earlier this year.
Since September, attacks and fatalities in Mosul have doubled. In January, the Iraqi Defense Minister said that "The situation in Mosul is worse than imagined by far".
What caused this flare-up? The official narrative, that Mosul is seeing increasing violence because it has become the new center for Al Qaeda, is problemmatic in that it implicitly ascribes a worrying ability to regenerate to what a few months ago were meant to be scattered and small remnants of that group. Yet we're seeing no mention of this hyrda-like capacity in thin mainstream reporting so far.
However, there's another possibility that no-ones talking about too - that the insurgency isn't just an AQI one, but wider based and originating in abuse of Mosul citizens by occupying US and (Shiite) Iraqi Army forces. Back in early January, regional news outlets carried word of the shooting of two US servicemen just after Christmas by a Sunni Iraqi Army soldier. Local reports had it that the soldier got into an argument with an American officer who had been beating a pregnant Iraqi woman and the argument escalated to the point where he opened fire.
"I was there when the American captain and his soldiers raided a neighbourhood and started shouting at women to tell them where some men they wanted were," a resident of Mosul, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS on phone. "The women told them they did not know, and their men did not do anything wrong, and started crying in fear."
The witness said the U.S. captain began to shout at his soldiers and the women, and his men then started to grab the women and pull them by their hair.
"The soldier we knew later to be Kaissar shouted at the Americans, 'No, No,' but the captain shouted back at the Iraqi soldier," the witness told IPS. "Then the Iraqi soldier shouted, 'Let go of the women you sons of bitches,' and started shooting at them." The soldier, he said, then ran off.
The soldier, known as Caesar, was subsequently captured and the Iraqi Army took great pains to say he was an Al Qaeda mole and that there were probably others inside Army - and especially local Awakening - ranks. US officials denied the Sunni story but it seemed to have taken hold with local Sunnis anyway. Shortly after the incident, graffiti and leaflets began appearing in Mosul saying "well done, Caesar" and exhorting others to follow his example. Shortly thereafter, the latest round of escalating violence began in a city which had been relatively peaceful until then.
I've a feeling the mainstream media are missing a story here. Perfunctory dismissals at the time did nothing to defuse Sunni ill-will over their version of the incident and no full investigation of the circumstances surrounding the shooting was ever made public. A real hearts-and-minds failure in other words. That failure may well have been a major contributor to current events and one that should be addressed if peace is to return to Mosul. Left alone, the tale will continue to fester, pushing Sunnis into the regenerating insurgency and setting up a new whack-a-mole scenario in the city.
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