The New York Times, MOSUL, Iraq Since the Americans came to town seven months ago, the firefighters in this northern Iraqi city have received new trucks and new uniforms, American training and salaries 10 times bigger than they used to be. But when word came Sunday afternoon that two American soldiers had been shot in the head and killed a block away, the men of the Ras Al Jada fire station ran to the site and looked on with glee as a crowd of locals dragged the fallen from their car and tore off their watches, jackets and boots.
“I was happy, everyone was happy” said Waadela Mohammed, one of the firefighters, standing in front the firehouse. “The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave.”
It was not supposed to be this way in Mosul, an ethnically diverse city of two million people and the economic and cultural center of northern Iraq. As places like Ramadi and Falluja and Tikrit burned and rebelled against the American occupation this summer, Mosul seemed the one city with a majority of Sunni Arabs where most people called the Americans their friends. A vigorous and far-reaching effort by the 101st Division to rebuild the city's shattered public roads and buildings seemed to cement an unusually warm bond between the Americans and the Iraqis.
That appears to be changing very quickly. A string of attacks on American soldiers, which have resulted in more than 25 deaths this month, has highlighted what local Iraqis say is a rapidly deteriorating relationship with American forces.
Where once the Iraqi politicians saluted the American soldiers as their partners in rebuilding, many now say their complaints go unheard. Moderate Iraqis cooperating with the Americans say the young men of the city are increasingly heeding the calls of the extremist clerics.
With three prominent Iraqi politicians slain in recent weeks, the Iraqis say they are paying a steadily higher price for continuing to cooperate.
It is not too late, the local Iraqis say, to rebuild the relationship between the people of Mosul and their American occupiers, but few Iraqis here expressed much hope. With attacks rising, the Americans here have sent more troops into the city and detained dozens of suspected militants.
The result appears to be a kind of downward spiral, in which the crackdown on suspected Iraqi militants is helping to drain much of the good will still here. “I want the Americans to succeed, and I want every American soldier to go home safely,” said Raad Khairy Al-Barhawi, a member of the Mosul city council and a member of the city's Sunni Arab majority. “But the Americans have completely misunderstood the situation. I am stuck in the middle.”
The situation in Mosul, once so promising, now seems the subject of drastically different perceptions. American commanders here say the situation is still very much in control and that they still enjoy overwhelming support among the citizens of Mosul. They say the attacks against their men, while serious, are the work of perhaps a few hundred men, most of them members of Saddam Hussein's old regime. “I reject the idea that things have gone bad here,” said Colonel Joe Anderson, who commands about 5,000 men of the 101st Airborne Division in the heart of the city. “Most of the Iraqis are happy we are here, and they are cooperating to make this a better place.”
Indeed, the progress in Mosul, even with the recent spate of attacks, still strikes the visitor as remarkable. The streets seem mostly normal, and they are jammed with locals shopping and going about their daily business. The telephone, electricity and water networks here are in good working order, thanks in large part to $33 million in local projects carried out by American soldiers. A 28-member city council brings together this city's ethnic mix of Arab, Christians, Kurds, Shabaks and Yazidhis.
Anderson said the Americans had identified three cells of about 100 resistance fighters each – a relatively small number, given the city's size. Other American officers here said that many of the attacks against them had been staged by Iraqis who had come north from Baghdad and other parts of the Sunni Triangle, the Sunni-dominated area north and west of the capital that is generating the majority of attacks against the American forces.
In a series of assaults last week, American troops raided what they described as a “rat line” of houses and sympathizers that allowed militants to travel from Baghdad to Mosul. More than 170 others have been detained in other raids around the area as part of the crackdown on the guerrillas here.
Among those recently seized, the Americans say, are three members of Al Qaeda and two of another militant Islamic group, Ansar al-Islam.
“What I think is that this is a case of people coming from the outside trying to spoil a good thing,” said Major Trey Cate of the 101st Airborne. But local Iraqis, even the ones who count themselves as America's staunchest supporters, say the problems go deeper and are far broader. Great, and perhaps unrealistic, expectations have been met with disappointment as vast numbers of Iraqis still find themselves unemployed. The pool of money the American military used here to employ hundreds of Iraqis for local projects has dried up, and the large sums allocated by the U.S. Congress for Iraqi reconstruction have yet to arrive.
A large network of former Baath Party members, stretching from the universities to the government offices, openly flouts the Americans' edicts, and some Iraqis quietly support the resistance.
“I would say that the number of people fighting the Americans numbers in the thousands, or the tens of thousands,” said Hunien Kadu, a professor at Mosul University and a member of the Mosul City Council. “There are deans and assistant deans who were high members of the Baath Party, teaching classes. There are Baathists all through the government. The Americans can't continue to let these operate.”
