MOSUL, IRAQ // With shattered windows, collapsed roofs and bullet-scarred walls, it is almost inconceivable that anyone lives in the houses along this street in central Mosul. Yet, flanked by dozens of shuttered shops, Hareth Mustafa is baking bread. Mr Mustafa, a Kurd in the heart of Arab West Mosul, reopened his tiny bakery in May when US and Iraqi soldiers began clearing away bombs and rubble to reopen the main highway running through town. "All of the shops depend on this road," said Mr Mustafa, wearing a white T-shirt and baggy Kurdish trousers as he removed rounds of flat bread from a wood-fired oven and laid them on a cotton sheet. There have been many defining battles in Iraq in the past five years. Some of them - as in Mosul - are for the soul of a city. Four hundred kilometres north of Baghdad, the faultlines between Iraq's ethnic, religious and tribal groups intersect in Iraq's second-biggest city. The demographic breakdown is disputed, but Sunni Arabs are believed to make up more than half the population and Kurds at least 25 per cent - fewer than before Saddam Hussein started his campaign to 'Arabise' northern cities by expelling Kurds. Before the war, Mosul was a major military and Baath Party centre. There were thousands of senior Iraqi officers, including more than 1,000 generals, living here, all of them instantly thrown out of work by the US decision to disband the army after toppling the Iraqi regime. It was fertile ground for a home-grown insurgency and later, a strategic centre of gravity for al Qa'eda in Iraq. In early April 2003, on the day Saddam's army abandoned the city and before US troops arrived, Mosul's centre was in chaos. The central bank had been set on fire and Iraqis dashed in and out of the burning building with armloads of dinars. Gunfire rang out across the square. Saddam's palace, luxury hotels and even hospitals were torn apart in an orgy of looting. The US army's 101st Airborne Division, headed by then-Major Gen David Petraeus, restored order in an early version of the counterinsurgency strategy he adopted in all of Iraq four years later. But the programme of job creation, local elections and reaching out to former military leaders could not repair the badly damaged infrastructure or provide assistance to the many Sunnis who found themselves unemployed and alienated. When the division was replaced by a US force half its size in 2004, there was already a simmering Sunni insurgency. Although US and Kurdish Iraqi army forces retook the city when the Iraqi police force collapsed in a wave of insurgent attacks a year later, they were unable to wipe out the insurgency or the al Qa'eda sanctuaries. When the latest US troops arrived in January, they travelled down Baghdad Highway - the main road through Mosul - only in their heaviest armoured vehicles. In July, their commander, Lt Col Keith Barclay, was walking along the street to see who was starting to come back to the neighbourhood. "If you knew how hard this was to get started you'd be impressed," Lt Col Barclay said. "One day there were 26 IEDs [improvised explosive devices] on this road. There were so many IEDs for so long they destroyed the road." As US and Iraqi troops prepared to move into the West Mosul neighbourhood of Mosul Jadeeda in January and February, al Qa'eda began blowing up key buildings to prevent soldiers from occupying them. The phone exchange now lies in a twisted wreck along with most of the houses on the block. A tangle of overturned metal marks the remains of police cars blown up along with the police station - one of the biggest targets. In one attack, 10 tons of explosives levelled an entire city block - killing dozens of Iraqis and wounding hundreds. Iraqi officials declared Mosul the last urban stronghold of al Qa'eda in Iraq. This was hard-fought territory - the city was the centre of the lines of communication and supply for al Qa'eda and other insurgent groups from the Syrian border to central Iraq. Baghdad Highway was bombed so many times, rubble had made it impassable. Commerce dried up. Lorries carrying goods from Turkey and Syria had to take detours hundreds of kilometres long. But things are changing. First to return have been the bakers, the grocers and the tea shop owners. The doctors and engineers will be much harder to persuade that it is safe. "This was the John Hopkins of Mosul," said Lt Col Barclay, pointing to an abandoned private hospital. The children, though, seem fearless. "We can play in the streets now," said Youssef, 13, standing with his 10-year-old friend, Mohammed. They live down a side street and recalled how their parents would keep them at home when the gunbattles rang out on the main road. Near the old market on Shara al Thabet - Officer's Street - businesses are still struggling with the realities of curfews and security restrictions. "A lot of the streets are still blocked and it affects our business," said Laith, who is trying to make a living selling nuts from a stand. Iraqi security forces put up a new traffic barrier every other day, he said. Al Qa'eda in Iraq and other insurgents groups ruled the streets of West Mosul. When US forces started building combat outposts in January, "there was no security presence - no police, no Iraqi army, no coalition presence", said Lt Col Barclay, who commands 1,900 soldiers in West Mosul. Late last year, soldiers were being attacked every time they went out. Once they established combat outposts in the city - buildings in the middle of neighbourhoods with US and Iraqi soldiers - it dropped to fewer than one attack per 100 patrols. There are now 19 combat outposts in West Mosul and another seven in the northwest of the city. "There is nowhere that we're not," Lt Col Barclay said. The strategy is to link those combat outposts and hand them over to Iraqi forces, creating a security network for the city which will remain when US forces leave. While most army units gauge levels of violence by the number of attacks, Lt Col Barclay said that was an imperfect metric. He defines it partly by the number of attacks per patrol. "You can say it's peaceful if you never go there." And unlike most military clearing operations in which US soldiers do mass sweeps looking for insurgents and often alienating the people whose support they need, Lt Col Barclay said his troops developed relationships with local residents before conducting major raids. "I believe that clearing presupposes you know where the enemy is," he said. In Mosul, Iraqis and Americans are bracing themselves for renewed violence ahead of provincial elections expected in the autumn. Of all the religious and ethnic fault lines in this ancient city, the biggest is that between Arabs and Kurds. The Iraqi regime for years expelled Kurds from Mosul to try to Arabise the city. When Saddam was toppled, the balance of power shifted to the Kurds. Mosul will likely have to eventually decide whether it wants to be part of Kurdish or Arab Iraq. Those battles, most people hope, will be fought politically as the city emerges from the pitched fighting in its scarred streets. @email:jarraf@thenational.ae
