Iraqi troops rushed to Mosul to crush uprising

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government rushed reinforcements yesterday to the country’s third-largest city, Mosul, seeking to quell a deadly militant uprising that U.S. officials suspect may be in support of the resistance in Fallujah — now said to be under 80 percent U.S. control.

Police in Mosul largely disappeared from the streets, residents reported, and gangs of armed men brandishing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers roamed the city, 225 miles north of Baghdad. Responding to the crisis, Iraqi authorities dismissed Mosul’s police chief after local officials reported that officers were abandoning their stations to militants without firing a shot.

Elsewhere, insurgents shot down a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter near Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad, wounding three crew members, the military said. It was the third downed helicopter this week after two Marine Super Cobras succumbed to ground fire in the Fallujah operation.

In Fallujah, U.S. troops pushed insurgents into a narrow corner in the southern end of the city after a four-day assault that has claimed 22 American lives and wounded about 170 others. An estimated 600 insurgents have died, according tothe military.

Despite the apparent success in Fallujah, violence flared elsewhere in the volatile Sunni Muslim areas, including Mosul, where attacks Thursday killed a U.S. soldier. Another soldier was killed in Baghdad as clashes erupted yesterday in at least four neighborhoods of the capital. Clashes also broke out from Hawija and Tal Afar in the north to Samarra — where the police chief was also dismissed — and Ramadi in central Iraq.

The most serious incidents took place in Mosul, a city of about 1 million people, where fighting raged for a second day. Gunmen attacked the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party in an hourlong battle that a party official said left six assailants dead.

Militants also assassinated the head of the city’s anti-crime task force, Brig. Gen. Mowaffaq Mohammed Dahham, and set fire to his home.

“With the start of operations in Fallujah a few days ago, we expected that there would be some reaction here in Mosul,” Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. forces in the city, told CNN from Mosul.

Gen. Ham said he doubted the Mosul attackers were insurgents who fled Fallujah and said most “were from the northern part of Iraq, in and around Mosul and the Tigris River valley that’s south of the city.”

Capt. Angela Bowman, a spokeswoman at the U.S. headquarters in Mosul, said “some of these attacks are in support of the resistance in Fallujah.”

In a telephone interview with Al Jazeera television, Saif al-Deen al-Baghdadi, an official of the insurgents’ political office, urged militants to fight U.S. forces outside Fallujah.

“I call upon the scores or hundreds of the brothers from the mujahideen … to press the American forces outside” Fallujah, Mr. al-Baghdadi said.

“We chose the path of armed jihad and say clearly that ridding Iraq of the occupation will not be done by ballots. [Prime Minister] Iyad Allawi’s government … represents the fundamentalist right wing of the White House and not the Iraqi people.”

Mr. Allawi gave the go-ahead for the Fallujah offensive.

In addition to firing the Mosul police chief, Iraqi authorities also dispatched four battalions of the Iraqi national guard from garrisons along the Syrian and Iranian borders.

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