Posted on 09/22/2007 9:20:45 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
MOSUL, Iraq - Competent Iraqi security forces and a deluge of tips from residents have helped U.S. troops tamp down violence in northern Iraq despite an influx of al-Qaida fighters responsible for occasional spectacular attacks, U.S. officials say.
But American commanders believe the key to lasting peace is to resolve the region's most vexing political problem — Kurds hold too much power in the local government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.
The situation here is somewhat similar to that in Baghdad, where U.S. troops have managed to reduce violence but politicians have failed to reach agreements for long-term stability.
With about 2.7 million residents, Ninevah is Iraq's second-largest province in area behind Anbar, and second only to Baghdad in population. Ninevah's parched, rolling hills — crisscrossed by the Tigris River — are bounded by Syria to the west, and stretch up to snowcapped mountains in Kurdish territory to the north and east.
It is also the country's most diverse, with dozens of ethnic and religious minorities including the ancient Yazidi sect. Homeland of the biblical prophet Jonah, Ninevah contains many archaeological ruins and some of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world.
About 45 percent of Ninevah province is Sunni Arab, 40 percent is Kurdish and 15 percent is Christian or Shiite. Yet three-quarters of provincial council members won their seats running on a Kurdish ticket. The governor is a Sunni Arab and his deputy is Kurdish.
That imbalance leads some Sunni Arabs to suspect the Kurds are trying to expand their influence southward from their autonomous — and more peaceful and economically flourishing — Kurdish zone to the north, said Col. Stephen Twitty, the top U.S. military commander in Ninevah province.
Such suspicions, he said, have fueled the insurgency.
"I think if we solve the Arab-Kurdish issue here, we go a long way toward solving the Sunni Arab insurgency," Twitty said.
Ninevah's lopsided political layout is a consequence of the Sunni Arab boycott of January 2005 elections, which ushered in representational government across Iraq for the first time in modern history.
At the national level, the Sunni boycott gave Iraq's majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies a much bigger share of power than would have been expected based on their percentage of the population.
The imbalance in national government was redressed somewhat in the December 2005 parliament elections, when many Sunnis voted and more of them were elected to parliament.
But the January 2005 election was the last time Iraqis voted for local officials — and the imbalance in provincial government remains. Many Arabs here believe their Kurdish local leaders do not represent them.
The solution, U.S. and Iraqi officials say, is in a draft law that remains stalled in Iraq's parliament: the Provincial Powers Act. It lays out a timetable for new elections, and also delineates the separation of powers between provincial leaders and Iraq's federal government.
The law is among several key pieces of power-sharing legislation that Washington considers essential to peace. But the bills are still bogged down in Baghdad.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have managed to keep violence under control despite the ethnic tension and occasional high profile attacks such as the August truck bombings in the town of Qahataniya that killed at least 400 people.
In Ninevah's provincial capital, Mosul, the U.S. military says the number of attacks has dropped to 66 per week, compared to a weekly average of 95 in January. That's been a boon for Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
But the provincial council's makeup has stymied progress on the political front.
"When you go from 18 attacks a day to 10 a day now, I think, `Somebody help us out here on the political side,'" said Twitty, from Spartanburg, S.C.
The U.S. commander in northern Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, had recommended that Ninevah province shift to Iraqi control in August.
But with a springtime influx of al-Qaida fighters, along with the province's precarious political balance, that date was pushed back to at least November.
This past May, Ninevah's scruffy hills absorbed hundreds of al-Qaida fighters seeking refuge from coalition offensives farther south around Baghdad, Mixon said.
They joined about 15 foreign militants who remained in Ninevah after a prison break in Mosul freed up to 70 terror suspects in March, he said. The influx of al-Qaida militants fleeing U.S. and Iraqi operations around Baghdad, plus the escaped inmates, mixed for a deadly recipe.
On May 16, nine car bombs went off near marketplaces and Iraqi police stations across Mosul. Since then, U.S. and Iraqi officials say they've been able to quell what could have been a sustained al-Qaida campaign.
"We have a saying in Iraq, that when you stumble and fall down, you end up rising twice as tall," said Akeed Hassan, the 37-year-old head of Mosul police, noting that residents are given many tips to authorities about movements by al-Qaida in Iraq. He refused to give his full name out of security concerns. While attacks on civilians by al-Qaida in Iraq have occurred only rarely since May, Hassan and other Iraqi security officials are still frequent targets.
Hassan and other Iraqi and American officials said the province's Sunni Arabs turned against al-Qaida after the May 16 attacks, and anonymous tips from the local community have doubled.
Most of Ninevah's Arabs now support the provincial government, and are pushing for new elections in which they believe they will win a greater share of power, officials said.
"We meet with Sunnis here in public forums and in very discreet ones, and they all readily acknowledge (the 2005 election boycott) was a mistake," said Joshua Polacheck, public diplomacy officer for the U.S. State Department's provincial reconstruction team in Ninevah. "I don't know one Sunni Arab who says it wasn't a mistake to boycott those elections."
“Competent Iraqi security forces and a deluge of tips from residents have helped U.S. troops tamp down...” the treasonous Democrats.
From the AP for a change.
The terrorists were sitting around their tv sets rooting for the democrats on C-SPAN, but we’ll take calm anyway we can get it.
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