Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted
Luke Harding in Mosul
The Guardian,
Saturday April 12 2003
.....
By the time Asif Mohammed turned up for work yesterday morning, the ancient contents of Mosul's museum had vanished. The looters knew what they were looking for, and in less than 10 minutes had walked off with several million dollars worth of Parthian sculpture.
.....
"It's just been wrecked. I'm extremely angry. We used to have American and British tourists who visited this museum. I want to know whether the Americans accept this."
It was a good question. Unfortunately, as Mosul descended yesterday into a hellish self-feeding chaos, there were no American troops to ask.
The Pentagon had earlier promised that thousands of its soldiers would secure Mosul - a pleasant city of 1 million on the banks of the Tigris - and prevent the kind of mass looting seen elsewhere in Iraq. They would also keep out the Kurds
.....
Yesterday it was abundantly clear this was not true. A quick tour of central Mosul revealed there were no American troops there at all. Several thousand were stationed just down the road in Irbil, inside Kurdish-northern Iraq, but they had failed to arrive.
The Iraqi government abandoned Mosul late on Thursday night. Just as in Kirkuk, Iraqi soldiers garrisoned in the city took off their uniforms and simply drifted away. Overnight American special forces entered briefly with groups of Kurdish peshmerga. The Americans then disappeared.
....
However, last night a US special operations team met Mosul's tribal and community leaders in an attempt to put an end to the unrest.
Colonel Walter Meyer told the group that US soldiers were being redeployed there from the Kurdish cities of Arbil, Dohuk and Akra.
....
Had he [Kurdish commander, Wahid Majid] seen the Americans? "They were here earlier but they were unable to control the situation so they left," he said. ....
Bookmarks