MOSUL, 14 April 2003 — Calm returned yesterday after two days of looting and inter-communal fighting in the main northern Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, with US troops reassuring Turkey by replacing Kurdish fighters in the oil-rich cities.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told the CNN-Turk television that the “forces which were there have withdrawn”.
The Mosul police were back on the streets Sunday, while vigilantes were also trying to restore order in the 1.5-million city where as many as 20 people were killed and 200 wounded in the past two days of fighting between Arabs and Kurds.
Wearing white armbands, they started re-deploying in the city. “It’s been a very quiet day, civilians are very cooperative. There have been only a very limited number of acts of revenge between Kurds and Arabs,” said one policeman, Rafah Hassan.
Kurdish residents and members of the Free Iraqi Forces — which is part of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC) umbrella opposition group — were sharing the task of protecting the city’s infrastructure, US military sources said.
The coalition beefed up its presence inside the city, which fell to US-backed Kurdish fighters on Friday, but maintained a relatively low profile yesterday, an AFP correspondent reported.
A Kurd was killed when a gunfight erupted outside the emergency department of the main hospital. One US soldier was slightly wounded at dawn when a US patrol came under fire. Later in the day, an armored US patrol toured the streets, calling on the population to leave their weapons at home.
“Americans are still being targeted but occurrences of shooting incidents are declining,” US military sources said.
On Mosul’s main crossroads, civilians armed with Kalashnikovs are keeping a close watch on the situation.
“If we see a suspicious vehicle with stolen equipment or armed Kurds, we stop them and disarm them. If the vehicle refuses to stop, we have instructions to open fire,” said Ghanem Abdullah, a 34-year-old worker turned militiaman.
Remorseful looters were even bringing back looted items to the city’s mosques, where eclectic collections of chairs, heaters, desks and other items were piling up.
Several neighborhoods were still without electricity, water or telephone, but the hospital’s head surgeon Muzahim Kawat said there no signs of alarming food shortages.
The situation was similar in Kirkuk, the other northern oil hub. Calm was also slowly returning to the streets, and US presence was being beefed up although still relatively small, while Kurdish fighters were scarcely seen.
On Saturday, an intercommunal committee was created to administer and secure the city, where violence and looting quickly followed its takeover by coalition troops on Thursday.
Members of the city’s ethnic Turkmen community, seen by many senior Iraqi Kurds as Ankara’s fifth column in an area once part of the Ottoman Empire, have claimed they were being singled out by looters.
Kirkuk was “ethnically cleansed” under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who expelled many of its original inhabitants and replaced them with Arabs.
US soldiers began to arrive in the city on Friday after a furious Turkey, which fears Kurdish dominance of the north would arouse separatist aspirations among its own Kurdish minority, secured a pledge from Washington to force the peshmerga out.
Turkey has repeatedly threatened to intervene militarily in northern Iraq if Kurdish forces remain in control of Kirkuk and Mosul.
Gen. Rostam Hamid Rahim, a top commander with the pro-US Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two Kurdish factions in northern Iraq, said 2,000 US soldiers were already present in the city on Saturday.
