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Excerpts from the most recent CPA briefing:
GEN. KIMMITT: In the northern zone of operations, coalition and Iraqi security forces conducted 115 patrols, four offensive operations and detained three anti-coalition suspects.
Yesterday Iraqi police were attacked with small-arms fire from a house in Mosul; two Iraqis were wounded and one apprehended. Inside a vehicle nearby, police found and confiscated two rocket-propelled grenades and three hand grenades.
Yesterday forces reported that a contractor security patrol was attacked with small-arms fire northwest of Mosul. The attack resulted in three injured security employees, later medevac'd to coalition medical facilities. Today three coalition soldiers were wounded by IED during a patrol of Mosul. There was minor damage to two vehicles, but all the injured soldiers returned to duty.
Yesterday two Coalition Provisional Authority vehicles were engaged by small-arms fire. They broke contact and sought refuge at an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps checkpoint. The ICDC protected them and deployed a quick-reaction force to the site. After a brief firefight, the ICDC captured two individuals. [...]
Q: Dan Murphy from the Christian Science Monitor. I guess this is for General Kimmitt. Why do you think the security situation seems to have deteriorated so badly in and around Mosul? Thanks.
GEN. KIMMITT: Well, first of all, that's an assessment that you may be making; it is certainly not an assessment being made by the personnel up in Mosul. They did have, over the past few days -- I believe on the 28th and 27th -- an up-tick in the number of attacks. It normally gets somewhere in the order of four to five attacks per day. On one particular day it spiked up to 12. They are not yet ready to suggest that it's either a trend as much as it might just be one or two bad days. They've had a very good day for the last two days, and I know when I talked to them today they felt that the situation at this point still remains manageable and they're not really to suggest -- they are not ready at this point to suggest that the security situation has changed in any appreciable manner. [...]
Q: Do you know anything about reports from Mosul that 300 police officers have quit?
GEN. KIMMITT: We were asked that last night. We contacted the military units up in Mosul. They have no knowledge of any such massive resignation on the part of any number of police up in that region. [...]
Q: Colin McMahon from the Chicago Tribune. General, a couple of questions back to Mosul. One specifically, that incident in which the car with the four people attacked coalition forces and then they shot them dead, was there any indication that those people in that car had been involved in any of the attacks of the previous couple of days or that day even? That's the first question.
The second one is, notwithstanding that this up-tick may or may not be a change in security situation in Mosul, you talked last night about the possibility that there may be some tribal or criminal elements involved. Do you have anything more on that?
GEN. KIMMITT: On the first, we don't believe that the incident the other day, where there was a drive-by shooting against coalition forces, where fire was returned and four persons were killed in a car, we can't at this point establish any linkage between that incident and any of the other incidents of the past few days.
With regards to whether we can definitely link many of the activities up in Mosul to either criminal or to tribal disputes, politics, that is something that we continue to look at. We haven't made the exact link. We suspect there is some criminal activity up there, which would cause some of this violence. But the sooner we find out the answer to those questions, the sooner we can go to the heart of it and try to get Mosul back to -- either prevent it from having a trend line, where we're going to see more and more attacks, and get it back to a stable and secure environment, which it's pretty much been over the last few months.