Military commanders are very concerned about spreading insurgency

[kentuck]

The Mosul Hotel houses GIs and sits safely about 250 miles north of Baghdad. However, there have been a couple of attacks, with casualties, in the last few days. This is the safe city that Congressmen and Congresswomen were taken to show the progress being made in Iraq.

This will make the area much more difficult to police, especially if the troop strength dwindles as planned. This is what they are talking about behind closed doors.
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a link:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=1&u=/ap/20031107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

The spate of attacks in the past week in Mosul, Iraq (news - web sites)'s third-largest city, has raised concerns among U.S. military commanders that the insurgency is spreading into that region from its main stronghold in the so-called Sunni Triangle, to the west and north of Baghdad.


The city is close to the semiautonomous Kurdish areas that lie between it and the Turkish border.


In Baghdad, about 500 people marched Friday toward coalition headquarters to protest the arrest of 36 clerics in the past couple of months.


They chanted Islamic slogans including "America's army will be wiped out," and "America is the enemy of God." They also carried a large banner reading "Prisons ... will never terrify us."


....more

[David__77]

1. Clearly, the Iraqi public doesn't want to fight for the occupation.

They've hired some police and guards from the same social strata that would be mercenaries anywhere else. Others are working with the occupation because they think it will be good to work within the system for their country. But the masses of people there don't seem to care for the safety of US troops--and is this surprising? It should not be at all. Iraq has been humiliated before the world and is now in the grip of the lon superpower.