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Title: Mosul 'repackaged as final stand' to sell war in Iraq
Source:
Raw Story
URL Source: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Mosul ... ed_as_final_stand_to_0320.html
Published: Mar 21, 2008
Author: David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Post Date: 2008-03-21 15:12:25 by robin
Keywords: None
Views: 10
American and Iraqi forces began moving into the area in late January, following a wave of bombings and Prime Minister Maliki's announcement that "today the forces started to move to Mosul, and the battle will be final." American commanders suggested at the time that they expected a slow, grinding process and downplayed Maliki's idea of a "climactic battle." However, since recent visits to Iraq by presidential candidate John McCain and Vice President Dick Cheney, the idea of Mosul as a crucial turning-point has gained fresh emphasis. Channel 4's foreign affairs correspondent, Nick Paton Walsh, recently spoke with American soldiers carrying on the counter-insurgency, much of which consists of a house-to-house search for suspected insurgents. The Americans contend that many of these fighters are teenagers who are being hired by foreign fighters. "We try to fight the insurgency without creating more insurgents," an American officer told Walsh. "There was a young man who was paid by insurgents to place an IED. He was more of a disaffected youth. ... He had a large family to take care of, so he sought to take care of them as best he could." The Americans are building a wall around Mosul to intercept the flow of weapons, but the locals report they do not feel any safer. "So far, none of America's tactics have stopped Mosul's streets being littered with roadside bombs," Walsh noted. When asked "exactly who the Americans are fighting," Walsh replied, "They say 'al Qaeda.' If you push them further on that, we're talking about a hundred men, possibly, maybe the financiers and ringleaders. Another group they mention a lot is the Islamic State of Iraq, sometimes working with al Qaeda, sometimes against them." "Whether they can win or not is obviously the key question," Walsh continued, "because Mosul has been repackaged now as kind of the final stand, the real reason why America has to stay in Iraq. We heard Senator McCain ... talking about a victory here by extremists and the US would lose its credibility. And just behind him followed Vice President Dick Cheney." McCain stated during his recent trip to Iraq, "There is a big fight going on up in Mosul right now and although it is progressing, I think it is al Qaeda’s — not al Qaeda’s last stand, it is al Qaeda’s place where they feel that they need to keep Mosul in order to survive." "We are seeing the American administration here very much suggesting that we could see Iraq turning into some kind of 1990's Afghanistan, a base for terrorism, unless they manage to push this through," Walsh concluded. "And that's being used to sell this continuing conflict to a very war-weary public in America." This video is from Channel 4 News, broadcast March 20, 2008. 
Even though the "surge" appears to have been effective in quelling violence in much of Iraq, there are still pockets of hard-core resistance. One of those is the city of Mosul in the north, where according to Britain's Channel 4 News, "US troops are battling the last concentration of Sunni insurgents, in what the Americans are calling 'the final stand against al Qaeda in Iraq.'"
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