The Sunday Times reports, “Al-Qaeda is driven from Mosul bastion after bloody last stand.” The overall story is similar to other parts of Iraq:
In Mosul, Al-Qaeda’s last redoubt, the group still held sway as recently as Easter. Now it lacks the strength to fight the army face to face and has lost the sympathy of most of the ordinary citizens who once admired its stand against the occupying forces and their allies in the Iraqi army. . .
Al-Qaeda was also bleeding support as allied Iraqi insurgents accepted an amnesty. It did not apply to Al-Qaeda. “If you are fighting to install sharia [Islamic law] on this country, you are going to have to be killed,” said Colonel David Brown, an American adviser to 2nd Division.
Mosul is significant, however, because it was Al Qaeda’s last bastion. Now they are on the run throughout Iraq.
(ASIDE: Over a month ago, the Iraqi Interior Ministry prematurely declared that Al Qaeda was cleared from Mosul (or at least the AFP reported they did), but that was contradicted by the US Army. This report, on the other hand, sounds credible to me.)
By the way, this is an unusually good article. It contains some interesting operational details, and is written by an actual war correspondent on the scene:
Marie Colvin has been a Sunday Times foreign correspondent since 1986 when she witnessed the US bombing of Tripoli. She has covered the Middle East throughout that time and in 1991 remained in Baghdad during the bombing of the first Gulf war.
She has won a string of awards for her reporting from other troublespots, including Chechnya, Zimbabwe and East Timor.
In 1999 she chose to stay on in a besieged United Nations compound in Dili, East Timor, when her male colleagues left. “They don’t make men like they used to,” [she said.]
I wish there were more like her.
(Via Instapundit.)
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