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Where Things Stand

Mar-14-2004 » Filed Under: Iraq News

Time magazine has a lengthy section in its upcoming issue examining Iraq one year later. Mosul is mentioned in the beginning of this particluar article.

[Link to Full Article]
By TERRY MCCARTHY/MOSUL

Talal al-Jalili's life these days is somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. The newly appointed dean of political science at Mosul University says he "lives like a prince," taking home more than $1,000 a month, about five times what he made last year. But he has the dean's job only because his predecessor, Abdul Jabbar Mustafa, was taken at gunpoint from his house on New Year's Eve and shot twice in the head in one of a series of political assassinations in the northern Iraqi city that police have been unable to solve.

Like many other Iraqis, al-Jalili routinely veers from optimism to apprehension. He drives to work in a new government car but nervously checks for potential gunmen in any vehicle that draws alongside him. He can afford to call his uncle in Texas on his new cell phone, but when a stranger at a cigarette stand cast an odd glance at him recently, al-Jalili dialed several friends to escort him home. "The roofs of Mosul are covered with new satellite dishes, and the streets are littered with Pepsi cans and banana skins," says al-Jalili, ticking off some of the items that have become widely available since Saddam Hussein's fall. But the change in Iraq has also ushered in new fears. As al-Jalili puts it, "We don't know who is our enemy."


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