Iraqi Troops Surrender Major City

The country’s third-largest city fell without a fight Friday to U.S.-led forces, some of whom began shifting their focus from winning the war to keeping the peace in an increasingly lawless land. Although President Bush would not declare victory in the military campaign, the seizure of Mosul cemented the allies’ hold on almost every major population center in Iraq.

The surrender of Iraqi forces in this northern city set off a violent spasm of looting and thuggery, a pattern that has been repeated in city after city. And with its majority Sunni Muslim population -- which enjoyed relative prosperity under Saddam Hussein’s regime -- Mosul gave the victorious troops a far warier welcome than in Baghdad or Basra, where many Iraqis had cheered the advance of U.S. and British troops.

“What kind of freedom is America trying to give us?” asked Usama Shamsaddin Aziz, an anesthesiologist at a Mosul hospital, as violence raged throughout the city.

While some Iraqis took up arms to guard their homes and businesses, U.S. military officials downplayed the disorder in Mosul, Baghdad, the northern city of Kirkuk and elsewhere. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld characterized it as the sort of “untidiness” that typically occurs when repressive regimes are overthrown.

“Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “Freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.”

The victory in Mosul meant that the United States and Britain now control all or most of Iraq’s four largest cities, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk, as well as most other significant centers of population. Although more fighting is expected before Iraq’s beleaguered armed forces are defeated, attention is turning to the potentially trickier business of securing order and establishing an interim government.

Bush, in his first public remarks since Baghdad fell Wednesday, said that although Hussein was no longer in power, the United States would not declare victory until it had determined that there were no illegal weapons in Iraq. So far, U.S. forces have not determined whether any banned weapons exist in the country, although troops have found some caches of what they suspect might be chemical weapons.

After visiting two Washington-area hospitals where he presented Purple Hearts to wounded soldiers, Bush also warned Iraq’s neighbor Syria against protecting Hussein’s inner circle.

“Syria just needs to know we expect full cooperation and that we strongly urge them not to allow for Baath Party members or Saddam’s families or generals on the run to seek safe haven and find safe haven there,” he said.

Senior administration officials said this week that members of Hussein’s government appeared to be headed toward Syria, which the U.S. has also accused of covertly providing material assistance to the former regime.

Fighting continued in the Iraqi city of Al Qaim, near the Syrian border, and U.S. forces prepared to do battle for Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, where Iraqi forces were reported to be digging in for what could be the last major fight of the war.

North of Tikrit, U.S. special operations forces discovered and destroyed five camouflaged small airplanes that were believed to have been intended for escape by senior Iraqi leaders, according to Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

Hussein remained a hot topic of speculation, with some reports suggesting anew that he was dead. Rumsfeld said he knew of no reliable accounting of the Iraqi leader’s fate.

“I have heard ... almost any conceivable report of that type you can imagine,” he said. “That he’s alive, that he’s not alive, that somebody saw him here and, no, that was his double.”

Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, was asked about Hussein and his two sons during a brief trip to Afghanistan. “They’re either dead, or they’re running like hell,” Franks said.

In Mosul, a city of 1.7 million about 70 miles south of Iraq’s three-way border with Syria and Turkey, commanders of the Iraqi army’s 5th Corps surrendered quietly Friday, leaving rampaging looters and armed thugs to celebrate while most people hid in their homes.

There was relatively little cheering and a great deal of fear as small groups of Kurdish guerrillas and U.S. Special Forces troops formally took command of Mosul, and quickly lost control of the streets. Its predominantly Arab, Sunni population may fear change more than people elsewhere in Iraq.

Looters hit many of the same targets that lured opportunists in other cities: government offices, the central bank, police stations, even a mosque.

To the southeast of Mosul, unrest also roiled the oil city of Kirkuk, which U.S. and Kurdish forces captured a day earlier. Smoke rose over the skyline and looters roamed the streets in taxis and tractors, hauling off furniture, computers -- whatever they could lay hands on.

“The Americans didn’t think about the day after liberation,” said Fairadoon Abdulqader, interior minister for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two main Kurdish political parties in the north of the country. “They didn’t coordinate with us. In all towns, this was their mistake.”

Looting also continued in Baghdad, where U.S. forces -- still occupied with sporadic firefights -- were under orders to stop civil disorder when they came across it.

“We’re in a transitional mode,” said Col. Ben Saylor, chief of staff to Brig. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division. “We’re shifting from military to military-civil activities. This country needs a lot of help.”

Marines in Humvees fanned out to residential neighborhoods and shopping areas as a show of strength and a way to assess the damage done to Iraqi society by the war and three decades of Hussein’s rule. Weapons and military gear were being removed from schools, homes and businesses.

“We want to pull the military out of this society and let the society take control of itself,” Maj. J.J. Sega said.

Marines and Navy SEALs uncovered an elementary school that apparently had been closed so that the Iraqi army could store armaments. Classrooms were stuffed floor to ceiling with boxes of rockets, ammo and hand grenades. A U.S. intelligence officer said Hussein apparently believed U.S. forces would not attack sites that were shown on maps as schools.

Marine officials said they hoped the looting would wind down and not spread to residential burglaries. “Soon, there won’t be much left to steal,” one officer said.

There were also reports of Iraqi citizens taking revenge on members of Hussein’s ruling Baath Party and on paramilitary fighters. In some cases, “street executions” were reported. In one incident, Iraqi citizens brought two badly beaten, hogtied Fedayeen Saddam militiamen to a Marine compound demanding that they be taken as prisoners of war.

“This is a good sign,” Capt. Andrew Young said. “Now the Fedayeen are afraid of both us and the Iraqi citizens. They’re on the run.”

In some Baghdad neighborhoods, armed residents set up checkpoints to monitor who came and went in an effort to restore order. Despite those efforts, looters brazenly went about their work in many parts of the capital, even stripping hospitals of desperately needed medicines and supplies.

In the Saddam City neighborhood, mobs attacked cars of journalists and tried to rob them of cameras and money. Elsewhere, roving gangs looted the Foreign Ministry and robbed and burned one of Baghdad’s major supermarkets.

Amid the disorder, many Iraqis continued to express gratitude to U.S. forces. Some Baghdad residents brought gifts of flowers, cigarettes and liquor to a Marine encampment at the former General Security Directorate, a 25-building, 75-acre complex once known as the most feared building in Baghdad because it was the headquarters of the secret police.

“Grown men are coming here with tears in their eyes, asking if we have any information about their families,” Marine Lt. Ty Moore said.

By Friday night, Baghdad had settled down. With no gunfire, no bombing, no allied planes buzzing overhead, it was perhaps the quietest night in the capital in weeks.

U.S. troops continued to be on high alert.

There were other incidents Friday in which Iraqi civilians were killed for failing to stop at checkpoints. At a Pentagon briefing, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed regret for one such shooting in the central city of Nasiriyah. He said Marines had opened fire on a van that ignored orders to stop, leaving two children dead and nine adults injured.

The State Department announced Friday that emerging Iraqi leaders would assemble on Tuesday for the first of a series of regional meetings aimed at creating an interim government to succeed the Hussein regime.

The meeting in Nasiriyah will provide a forum for a combination of exiles and individuals who remained inside the country during Hussein’s 24-year rule to discuss their vision of the future, State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said.

“We have designed this process to help organize an Iraqi administration that can be representative of the Iraqis, that can function on their behalf and that can start building the kind of representative government that is our goal to help the Iraqi people establish,” Boucher said.

But in what could be a significant blow to the effort, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two largest opposition groups, indicated that it would not send any representatives.

The council, led by Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, is made up almost entirely of Shiite Muslims, who dominate in southern Iraq.

Hamid Bayati, London representative of the council, said the group was willing to participate in a new Iraqi government, but not in an interim government that is to be overseen by retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner.

The U.S. goal is to hold a national conference in Baghdad, although State Department officials say that could still be at least several weeks away.

“It depends, obviously, on the military situation, on the security situation, on how quickly Iraqis are able to speak out in different places, how quickly Iraqis are able to start considering their own future in different parts of the country,” Boucher said. “You can’t have a national conference until people from the whole nation can attend.”

The session will be presided over by White House special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker.

In an indication of the continuing dispute in Washington over Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, U.S. officials said Friday that he has not been invited to the meeting, although they expect he will show up.

Also Friday, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri, who on Wednesday had declared, “The game is over,” said his final goodbyes at United Nations headquarters in New York. He said he planned to leave for Paris and then fly to Damascus, the Syrian capital, before returning home to Iraq.

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Watson reported from Mosul and Perry from Baghdad. Times staff writers Jeffrey Fleishman in Kirkuk; John Daniszewski and Michael Slackman in Baghdad; Mark Porubcansky in Doha; Edwin Chen, Richard Serrano and Robin Wright in Washington; and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.