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Fall of mosul Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/101/nation/Iraqi_soldiers_surrender_outside_Mosul+.shtmlhttp://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/101/nation/Iraqi_soldiers_surrender_outside_Mosul+.shtml
NORTHERN IRAQ
Iraqi soldiers surrender outside Mosul
By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 4/11/2003
OUTSIDE MOSUL, Iraq - Iraqi soldiers stripped off their uniforms, threw down their weapons, and ran to embrace advancing Kurdish fighters as forces loyal to Saddam Hussein crumbled yesterday across broad stretches of northern Iraq.
A Kurdish leader said peshmerga fighters had entered and taken control of the city of Mosul today as Iraqi officials negotiated final terms of their surrender. The rebels initially encountered no resistance.
''It is a liberated city,'' declared Said Chemanki, deputy commander of the Kurdish forces near Mosul.
Outside the city, however, heavy machinegun fire from the city's east side could be heard as about 250 heavily armed rebels awaited approval to join their comrades in the city.
Rebel soldiers who had entered the city and returned to its outskirts reported that residents had rioted last night, ousting Ba'ath Party officials from control of the city, the largest in northern Iraq.
The apparent success in Mosul and the easy taking of the north's other major city, the oil center of Kirkuk, placed vast amounts of land and key facilities in the hands of the US-led coalition. The successes also sparked a mass parade toward Baghdad of Iraqi soldiers who had abandoned their positions and discarded their uniforms and weapons.
Coalition forces, however, still face a challenge from diehard supporters of Hussein's regime in some areas of the north, as well as the diplomatic threat of military intervention in northern Iraq by Turkey.
US Central Command said battered remnants of Republican Guard divisions and the regular army appeared to have joined up south of Mosul to prepare for a possible last stand, alongside Special Republican Guards and Fedayeen Saddam in the maze of bunkers and fortifications in Hussein's hometown and tribal base, Tikrit.
The coalition's successes began rapidly yesterday. As the B-52 bombers that have decimated Iraqi forces circled overhead, US special forces and Kurdish fighters on trucks mounted with antitank missiles and heavy machine guns pushed deep into territory that had been occupied by Hussein's loyalists for the past 13 years. Iraqi troops, abandoned by their officers who had fled the night before, rushed out to greet them in a remarkable mass surrender that underscored the sudden collapse of the regime's power.
''What happened is a dream come true,'' said one of the Iraqis, Ali Nasr Jabbar, 25, who wore a woman's blouse and tights with a leopard-skin design - the only civilian clothes he had been able to buy after shedding his uniform - and a Kurdish yellow headband. ''The regime forced us to fight. Now we are brothers with the Kurds.''
Yesterday, a column of US M1A Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Humvees, flown into Kurdish-controlled Iraq on Wednesday, rolled toward Mosul.
''The Iraqi government has evacuated Mosul,'' said Omar Osman, a senior official of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which runs the western part of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.
As he spoke, several hundred peshmerga from the other main Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, drove up in buses to reinforce the front. The two factions, which have fought in the past, have been working together under US command in an effort to show they will be responsible players in postwar Iraq.
In a sign of the restraint Washington has urged on Kurdish forces, Osman said the peshmerga - whose name means ''they who face death'' - would advance only as far as the Tigris River.
The narrow road leading from Mount Maqloub, 4 miles northeast of Mosul, served yesterday as a main route for US-led forces advancing on the city, after Hussein loyalists retreating along the highway from Erbil to Mosul earlier yesterday blew up a strategic bridge over the Khazer River.
By this morning, however, the bridge had been repaired, allowing a column with hundreds of mostly Kurdish troops to pass over it on their way toward Mosul.
With ground forces consisting of only one paratrooper brigade and small teams of special forces commandos, the US military still appeared too weak in the north to hold large cities. The Fourth Infantry Division - the 60,000 heavily armed troops who were originally supposed to invade northern Iraq until Turkey rejected the idea of using its territory - may be deployed in the north from Kuwait.
Turkey has said repeatedly that it will not accept Iraqi Kurdish control of Mosul and Kirkuk, fearing that such control could encourage the creation of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq and inspire Kurdish rebels in Turkey.
Although Kurds consider Kirkuk and Mosul the heartland of their historical ethnic territory, Washington appears to be as determined to prevent the Kurds from trying to take control of the cities as it is opposed to Turkey sending its troops into Iraq.
But yesterday the Kurds advanced. In Altun Kopri, 15 miles northeast of Kirkuk, retreating Iraqis first put up a fight, wounding 15 peshmerga fighters. Then, a large group of soldiers threw off their uniforms and ran out to meet the US and Kurdish troops advancing on Altun Kopri. Joyous villagers rushed out to greet the US-Kurdish force, and destroy Hussein's images in the town.
''These are angels and they have saved us,'' cried Zareefa Sharif Mohamed, a Kurdish woman. ''I don't believe it. We are saved from that nightmare.''
Other groups of Iraqi soldiers fled to the nearby oil town of Dibis, where they, too, threw up their hands and surrendered. The Kurdish forces quickly moved to secure the large Bai Hassan oil field, which appeared to be functioning.
About 12 Iraqi prisoners were dressed in mismatched civilian clothes, which they said they had purchased with money left to them by one of their lieutenants before he and other officers fled toward Kirkuk. The Kurds had not bound them, and were feeding them and giving them cigarettes.
Jabbar, one of the prisoners, said his commander had killed two soldiers for refusing to fight and had threatened to kill him when he refused to fire on a civilian car.
''My commander fled like a mouse,'' Jabbar said, as a Kurdish fighter nearby fired AK-47 rounds at a painting of Hussein. ''They left us behind and we surrendered.''
Hussein's regime killed tens of thousands of Kurds and deported many more, forcing them to speak Arabic and relinquish their heritage and culture. When war began, the soldiers refused to let civilians leave Altun Kopri. Iraqi tanks in the town had dug in around the local school, to ensure high civilian casualties in case their positions were bombed.
Yesterday, the Iraqi troops left Altun Kopri, but not without a parting shot, turning their guns on the city and killing two before melting away.
This story ran on page A33 of the Boston Globe on 4/11/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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