Stryker Brigade News

"We are here to defend our people. We will fight, and we will win," their commander, Sadi Ahmed Pire, shouted at the 150 fighters crammed into the courtyard of his headquarters. "The Kurds of Mosul will not be second-class citizens."

"We are ready to defend our brothers!" the soldiers chanted in unison.

These scenes explain why Brigadier General Carter Ham, America's top military commander in the north, said he thinks ethnic war is still possible in Mosul.

American officers blame the untamed insurgency against the interim Iraqi government and their US protectors on a lethal marriage of convenience between a reconstituted Ba'ath Party and a well-developed Islamic movement in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.

While the Americans have tolerated the unofficial presence of thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga, who don't fall under Iraqi central government command, they worry that Mosul's volatile mix could touch off wider ethnic carnage.

A resurgent Ba'ath Party has made deep inroads in a population already sympathetic to Arab Islamist movements, American officials say. These same officials fear that intensified presence of powerful Kurdish paramilitaries could provoke the alliance of Ba'athists and Islamists to declare open war on Mosul's Kurds and escalate ethnic violence in the city.

In fact, some US and Kurdish commanders suspect the dozens of assassinated Iraqi soldiers are the first step in a terror campaign against the city's minorities.

According to Ham, Ba'athists and Islamist terror groups like that led by Jordanian Abu Musab al Zarqawi have united in Mosul to try to provoke ethnic war among Sunni Arabs on one side and the city's minorities on the other: Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrian Christians, and Yezidis.

"Zarqawi stated that a specific goal of his organization is to create ethnic strife, and specifically Arab-Kurd," Ham said. "The former regime elements also use that to their advantage." [...]

In that half of Mosul, only 200 police officers remain on the job out of a force of 5,000 before the November uprising, said Lieutenant Colonel Erik Kurilla, commander of US forces in the Old City.

Kurilla's soldiers, and some Iraqis, now occupy the police stations and are cleaning out the charred wreckage.

"The police could come back here, but the fear is they move back in and torch it," Kurilla said. "Do we have to have a permanent [Iraqi National Guard] presence at the police stations?"

A man named Khalid, an Assyrian Christian translator who used to work at the police stations until they were taken over by insurgents, said that on the day of the attacks at least three different bands -- each declaring, "We are the real mujahideen!" -- came to the police stations demanding that officers give them their weapons.

But all three groups were too late: the police had surrendered their arsenals the day before to Ba'athists, Khalid said.

Now, two dozen shivering Iraqi National Guard soldiers protect the New Mosul neighborhood branch police station, on the edge of the old city.

Four soldiers stood guard on the street on a recent day, while the rest clustered around the station's single kerosene heater, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests looted from the police station's storeroom.

American soldiers provide the real protection, with snipers and heavy machine guns arrayed on the station's roof.