U.S. Pulls Out and Mosul Debates Fate

U.S. troops abandoned the governor’s building here at the center of a bloody street battle this week, and then an extraordinary thing happened Friday: A peaceful debate momentarily filled the power vacuum.

Army Special Forces troops and Marines pulled out of Mosul’s city center Thursday, after at least 10 Iraqis died in two days of unrest that pitted Iraqi stone-throwers and snipers against American assault rifles and heavy machine guns.

Lt. Col. Robert Waltemeyer, commander of the 10th Special Forces in Mosul, ordered the troops out because a sniper on a nearby rooftop was a danger to their security as well as to civilians, an Army spokesman said.

The tactical military withdrawal is proving to be a politically astute move.

Mishaan Juburi, an Arab clan leader who sparked a riot Wednesday by proclaiming himself governor of Mosul, was forced to give up the symbolic seat of power when U.S. troops pulled out. Satisfied that they had overthrown another unpopular regime just days after celebrating Saddam Hussein’s fall, former members of a seething mob were able to sit and talk politics in a small tea shop Friday, right next to the riot’s ground zero.

There were about 45 men who had never been able to speak so openly before, disagreeing over who should govern them, and which politician or country was more criminal than another. Almost as shocking, when they were finished, there was no blood on the floor.

A common laborer’s opinion counted as much as a noble sheik’s. When a man claiming to be a retired army colonel angrily denounced the U.S. as a colonizer, others whispered that he was really one of Hussein’s Baath Party agents.

“I’m just an ordinary person and you can see, with the [American] soldiers gone, we can all sit and discuss politics peacefully,” said Rewat Badran, an unemployed worker.

But as with many Iraqis feeling their way through the first days of freedom, Badran’s optimism gave way to a sobering reality.

“It’s too early for democracy,” he said. “We’re still wounded, we’re still bleeding. Things have to return to normal first.”

Waltemeyer plans to meet with local leaders today to discuss how people in Iraq’s third-largest city want to choose their new government. If they want a citywide election, an Army spokesman said, one can be held.

“There’s no date or time, but it could happen,” said the spokesman, who declined to be named, citing military policy.

Most of Mosul’s 1.7 million people are Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq that dominated the country under Hussein’s regime. Many military leaders also come from the city, so there is fear here that Mosul will be on the losing end in postwar Iraq.

Looting continued in parts of the city Friday, where huge columns of black smoke rose on the horizon, only to shrink down to one of many smaller, gray plumes from the arson fires left to burn themselves out. Everyone in the teashop agreed that U.S. troops must do more to stop looters and get everyone back to work, but they also wanted the troops to leave Iraq. No one could explain how to reconcile the conflict between the two desires.

“We, as Iraqis, didn’t call the Americans to come and liberate us,” said Sheik Abdul Sattar Wais Ibrahim, a leader of the Sharabi clan, who strolled in from the street to join the curious watching the teashop debate.

“They came on their own and destroyed everything belonging to the previous regime,” he said. “Since they are very strong, and able to do so many things, we want them to give us security and keep their promises. We want to live as human beings.”

But the sheik warned that the American forces have no more than a few months to get things back to normal before their time is up and they must leave.

U.S. troops have lowered their profile in Mosul after the unrest, and Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas -- who took command of the city with American soldiers after it fell -- have largely withdrawn to the outskirts of town. Civilians armed with AK-47 assault rifles are defending their own homes in neighborhood defense committees.

Without any formal government, people in Mosul are trying to get an administration up and running through meetings of religious, clan and some political leaders, who have urged government staff to return to work without pay.

What Iraq needs right now, several men in the teashop said, are skilled people -- technocrats instead of politicians -- who can get the job done and not play power games.

“We are ignorant people,” said Muafaq Sammak, a photographer. “We don’t know how to manage ourselves. We need a well-cultured person, like an academic from the University of Mosul, to govern. All of us are willing to cooperate with that person.”

Any attempt to install exiled Iraqis as Mosul’s new leaders will provoke more violence, the men warned, like the riots that forced out Juburi, a former supporter of Hussein’s regime who fled the country and promptly got rich through various businesses.

Juburi is said to have once been a chauffeur of Hussein Kamel, a leading member of the president’s regime and also the husband of his favorite daughter. Kamel defected to Jordan in 1995.

As the man once responsible for throwing U.N. inspectors off the track in their search for weapons of mass destruction, the information Kamel provided in exile forced the Iraqi government to admit it had biological weapons.

When Kamel returned to Baghdad with his brother, Saddam Kamel, in 1996, they were both summarily executed. Some conspiracy theorists, and there are many in Iraq, say Juburi talked Kamel into the suicidal decision to go home.

Even among members of his own clan, Juburi is despised as an ambitious manipulator out to enrich himself.

“Those claiming that they are the Iraqi opposition, and who came from abroad to Iraq, cannot do anything for their own people,” said Saleh Muhammed Juburi. “They know nothing of our needs. We should have a leader who knows us very well and who has lived with our suffering. And those Juburis who come from abroad don’t represent us.”