City of the Dead Mosul on Lockdown

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05192008.html

Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al Qaida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country's northern capital into a ghost town. Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead by US troops who later issued a statement saying the two men were armed and one man made 'threatening movements.'

It is not easy to reach Mosul, a city of 1.4 million people on the Tigris river, sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al-Qa'ida began at 4 am on Saturday morning.

The operation is a critical part of the government's attempt over the last six weeks to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.

We began the journey from the Kurdish capital Arbil in a convoy of white pick up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some wearing black face masks, that were escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the city.

Soon after crossing the long bridge over the Zaab river and leaving territory officially controlled by the Kurds, we saw lines of trucks and cars, whose drivers presumably had not heard of the curfew, being stopped by police. The soldiers defending our convoy said that there was little real danger ahead, but even so we turned into a military headquarters in the Christian village of Bartilla to exchange our pick ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with small windows a few inches across of bullet proof glass.