Insurgents increased their efforts to take control of Mosul on Wednesday, ambushing a convoy of Kurdish peshmerga fighters and attacking the Kurdish deputy governor of Nineveh province.
The United States military commander in Mosul, Brigadier General Carter Ham, has warned that militants, mainly Sunni Arabs, are trying to foment civil war in the ethnically mixed city of 2-million.
Three peshmerga were killed and seven injured when their convoy was attacked on the main road into eastern Mosul, said Kareem Sinjari, the interior minister of the Kurdistan regional government in Irbil.
”There was an exchange of fire. We took some hits, but so did they,” he said.
The fighters, under the command of the Kurdistan Democratic party, led by Massoud Barzani, were on their way to protect the party offices in Mosul, which have come under frequent attack since a two-day uprising this month.
The deputy governor, Khasro Gouran, a Kurd, was attacked as he was leaving his office. One of his bodyguards was killed and two people, including his brother, were wounded.
Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, has been simmering for the past fortnight, since nine police stations were captured by insurgents.
Up to 3 200 of the city’s 4 000 police officers either deserted or joined the insurgents during the attacks.
Security is now in the hands of a small unit of US soldiers, aided by Kurdish units of the Iraqi national guard, which carried out a number of limited operations in insurgent areas on Wednesday, and an elite police commando unit.
Thousands of peshmerga have poured into the city, partly to protect party offices, but also to protect the Kurdish minority, and the Christian, Turkoman and Yezidi communities.
Their presence has angered many of the majority Sunni Arab community and raised the prospect of a wider conflict between Arabs and Kurds.
Mosul lies to the west of the Kurdish-ruled area but is regarded by US commanders and Kurdish leaders as crucial to the Kurdish region’s stability.
”It’s especially important for Iraq, the north and the Kurdish leaders to recognise that their security is dependent on the security in Mosul,” General Ham said.
In the past week at least 20 bodies of Iraqi police officers, national guardsmen and Kurdish militiamen — some decapitated — have been found in Mosul. The group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for the killing.
In his latest purported audiotape Zarqawi accused Muslim scholars of silence in the face of US action in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying they had ”let us down in the darkest circumstances”.
”You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the countries and the people to the Jews and Crusaders… when you resort to silence on their crimes, when you refused to hold the banners of Jihad and Tawhid, and when you prevented youth from heading to the battlefields in order to defend the religion.”
The US army said it had replaced Major General Geoffrey Miller, the officer in charge of its detention centres in Iraq, seven months after he was sent to deal with the problems exposed by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. His move was part of a routine rotation, officials said. General Miller previously commanded Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. – Guardian Unlimited Â