The sounds of automatic rifles firing, rocket-propelled grenades exploding and helicopters buzzing through the sky reverberated through the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, with a ferocity that took some residents back to the early days of the invasion of Iraq.
Halla Mukdad, a professor of economics and business administration at Mosul University, said she could not leave her home.
PHOTO: AFP
"The armed people are right outside our house door," she said.
In the spring of last year, it was US armor rolling in. Now, it was insurgents -- storming police stations and stealing guns, ammunition and body armor; setting fire to buildings and police cars; and even making off with a generator.
Later, gun battles with US and Iraqi forces broke out at the five Tigris River bridges the insurgents had seized. Kiowa helicopters swooped above the palm trees and sand-colored buildings, surveying the streets.
Mosul, the third-largest city in Iraq, has been torn by deadly violence throughout the occupation, with car bombings and assassinations becoming almost a routine part of daily life.
But the assaults have grown so incendiary over the last two days that the Stryker Brigade, the light-armored mobile unit charged with controlling the region, is pulling its battalion out of the Fallujah operation to send it north. Three Stryker battalions are already in the Mosul area.
US commanders have said insurgent leaders probably fled from Fallujah in the days or weeks before the offensive there and may be organizing the wave of counterattacks roiling central and northern Iraq. Mosul has seen the toughest fighting outside Fallujah.
In the morning, as the attacks on the police stations began, 13 sedans full of jihadists pulled up to the police academy. They opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. When they realized no one was inside, they broke open the doors and began looting.
The same thing happened at the Zuhoor police station, where the generator was carted away.
One group laid siege to the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the country's main Kurdish political parties. The building once housed the local offices of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and was set back from the residential areas. A half-dozen Kurdish militiamen managed to hold off the attackers with heavy machine guns.
The US counteroffensive had begun in an area called the Yarmouk Circle and later spread to other neighborhoods in the south of the city, said Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hastings, a spokesman for the task force that includes the Stryker Brigade. Insurgents melted away whenever the brigade's high-speed vehicles approached, he said.
Hastings said the insurgents had made only limited inroads.
"There are pockets of insurgents," he said. "The city is not falling apart by any stretch of the imagination."
An Iraqi reporter for The New York Times who drove around Mosul on Thursday saw some Stryker vehicles in the suburbs and on the highway to the airport, but few in the city. He encountered no Iraqi policemen, but saw carloads of insurgents brandishing Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Mosul is a diverse city with large numbers of Sunni Muslims, Christians and Kurds.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was