Patrick Cockburn: Under siege: A special report from war-torn Mosel

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2442515.ece

Under siege: A special report from war-torn Mosel
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 12 April 2007

"If you go in the streets by yourself, you'll be dead in 15 minutes," says Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city. An able, confident man, he speaks from experience, having survived more assassination attempts than almost any political leader in Iraq. The one-hour car journey to Goran's office from the Kurdish capital, Arbil, underlines the dangers. He has sent guards, many of them his relatives, to pick me up from my hotel. They travel in slightly battered civilian cars, chosen to blend in with the rest of the traffic, wear civilian jackets and T-shirts, and keep their weapons concealed.

We drive at great speed across the Greater Zaab river, swollen with flood water, into the province of Nineveh, of which the ancient city of Mosul is the capital. The majority of its 1.8 million people are Sunni Arabs and one third are Kurds, along with 25,000 Christians. Arabs and Kurds have been fighting for control of the city for four years. Every day brings its harvest of dead. "Five Kurds were killed here yesterday," says one of the guards dolefully.

The weapon of choice in Mosul these days is the vehicle-borne suicide bomb. We pass the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main Kurdish parties, where 19 people were killed by just such a bomb last year. I can see where a second suicide driver targeted another PUK branch office close to the light blue dome of a mosque in March, killing a further three people and wounding 20.

The city is not as obviously dangerous as Baghdad, where whole districts are intermittently controlled by Sunni insurgents or Shia militiamen. At a quick glance there even appear to be reasons for optimism in Mosul, since there are plenty of relaxed-looking policemen patrolling in their blue and white cars and directing traffic.

But such signs are misleading as an indication of uncontested government authority. In Mosul, the police are mostly Arab, while the two Iraqi army divisions are largely Kurdish. Out of 20,000 police, Goran believes that half belong to or sympathise with the Sunni resistance. When Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death last November, one policeman stuck a picture of the former leader on his windscreen by way of protest. We drive quickly through the crumbling walls of ancient Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, and past a large mound, beneath which is the tomb of Jonah, who, having survived his unfortunate experience with the whale, was buried here. Traffic is lighter than I remember during my visit last year. This is good news from the point of view of safety, because we are unlikely to get caught in a traffic jam, where other drivers have time to notice that I am obviously a foreigner and that the guards are wearing civilian shirts but camouflage trousers.

Unfortunately, the reason why there are so few vehicles on the streets turns out to be bad news for the people of Mosul and Nineveh province. Syria has suspended supplies of fuel. As a result, the province is getting only 10 per cent of its overall fuel needs and 4 per cent of its normal supply of petrol. Food rations are no longer being delivered. Water and sewage, as well as hospitals, are affected.

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