- MOSUL -- In the northern
city of Mosul, Mustafa al-Sheikh, a businessman turned television producer,
has just received a letter warning that he will be killed if he works with
the Americans.
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- Mr Sheikh has been hired by the US military to make a
film for local television lauding the Iraqi police in Mosul. He did not
plan to tell the police about the death threats. "They cannot even
defend themselves," he said.
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- Mr Sheikh is facing the same dilemma as tens of thousands
of Iraqis working for the US forces. With unemployment at 70 per cent they
have little choice. But they also know a job with the US military or civil
administration means danger. "People here think that anybody who works
for the Americans is a spy," Mr Sheikh said.
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- It is American casualties that make the headlines but
the majority of those killed are Iraqis. Only four out of the 100 or so
people killed in Iraq last weekend were non-Iraqi. The bombings in the
Kurdish city of Arbil on Monday killed 67 people and wounded 267, US military
officials said yesterday.
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- Mosul, a Sunni Arab city of 1.8 million people, had escaped
the suicide bombers until last Saturday when a car exploded outside a police
station. Nine people were killed.
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- Col Mohammed Khaeri, the police chief of Mosul province,
said that 37 of his men had been killed and 105 wounded since the US reconstituted
the police last year. He added: "One of our officers was shot and
killed the day before yesterday. We asked his name but nobody could remember
it." They later found out that he was called Salwan Jalami.
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- In the past two weeks two unarmed traffic policemen were
shot dead not far from The Independent office in Baghdad. Another casualty
in the same area was Abdullatif Ali al-Mayah, a human rights campaigner
who opposed the occupation. It did not save him. His car was stopped by
seven or eight men and he was shot. Competition for jobs is so intense
that anybody promoted by the Coalition Provisional Authority or the Interim
Iraqi Governing Council may be at risk from the person they replaced. Mr
Sheikh suspected that the anti-American resistance wanted to kill him because
people in the media thought he was taking work away from them. Sometimes
the motives for killings are obscure. There has been a rash of killings
of former senior bureaucrats in Saddam's government. "Nobody knows
if they were killed because they were co-operating with the coalition or
not co-operating," said the relative of one man who had just been
shot.
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- The US plan for withdrawal of its troops is to hand over
to Iraqis. Soldiers, police, the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps and security
men are rapidly being trained. There are numerous checkpoints on the roads
manned by Iraqis. The number of American troops is falling. In Mosul the
21,000 men of the 101st Airborne Division are being replaced by the 10,000
men of the Stryker Brigade.
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- It is not clear how Iraqi police will react with little
or no US military support. The omens are not very good. On the road into
Mosul from Baghdad there is an Iraqi police checkpoint. There is a picture
of a young officer in police uniform. A message below said he had died
a martyr. A policeman explained: "He was run over by an American tank."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=487924
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