Troops enter Mosul; rebel leader warns of an uprising

By Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Mosul in force yesterday to retake streets and police stations seized by rebels in the northern city last week, while a leading Iraqi insurgent claimed that the fighting in Fallujah was only the beginning of an uprising that has already roiled parts of Iraq dominated by Sunni Muslims.

"The Americans have opened the gates of hell," Abdullah Janabi said Monday in Fallujah, a city U.S. commanders have said they control after a week of often fierce fighting. "The battle of Fallujah is the beginning of other battles."

Janabi heads the mujahedeen shura, an 18-member council of clerics, tribal sheiks and former Baath party members that assumed control of the city of 250,000 shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April.

"We have succeeded in drawing them into the quagmire of Fallujah, into the alleys and small pathways. They have fallen into the trap of explosive charges, land mines and, now, the defenders' short supply lines inside the neighborhoods."

Speaking in an undamaged house in the city's Nazal district, Janabi mocked the statement of a senior Iraqi official who on Saturday told reporters that Janabi and another insurgent leader, Omar Hadid, were "cowards" who had fled the city before the offensive. Hadid is a ranking figure in Monotheism and Jihad, the group headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who by all accounts was out of Fallujah weeks before the U.S. offensive began on Nov. 8.

"I am here," Janabi said. "You can see me. And if you wait for a while, you can see Omar Hadid. He is still in the city."

Since declaring Fallujah liberated on Sunday, U.S. commanders have played down ongoing battles there, but bursts of gunfire and mortars exploded yesterday across the battle-scarred city as American forces continued to pursue insurgents. Fearful of a backlash, Allawi and other Iraqi officials have dismissed suggestions of a humanitarian crisis in Fallujah, where disputed reports of civilian casualties in April unleashed anger across Iraq. But Amnesty International, in a release yesterday, said the city still lacked water, electricity and organized means for evacuating the wounded.

After fighting erupted in Fallujah last week, insurgents moved to open a second front in Mosul, seizing control of parts of the city and attacking bridges and six police stations. Some stations were looted of body armor, uniforms, weapons and radios, and at least three were too wrecked to be reoccupied.

Yesterday, more than 2,500 U.S. troops entered Mosul, where gunfire echoed through rain-soaked streets that were largely deserted on the last day of a three-day Muslim holiday. The troops met little resistance, although four U.S. soldiers were wounded by a car bomb that detonated near their convoy on the city's western edge, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Mosul.

When the fighting first flared in Mosul, many of the city's 5,000-man police force fled. Hastings said about 1,000 policemen had returned.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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