1. "Turkey probes slayings of 2 Kurds by security forces", a father and his son, 12, are accused of being rebels and opening fire first, but a human rights group says they were probably unarmed.

2. "Road to EU passes from Mardin", opinion by Mehmet Ali Birand.

3. "Turkish torture victim speaks out", the well-documented use of torture - specifically the systematic use of torture by the organs of state security - was for many years one of the prime reasons for the exclusion of Turkey from European institutions.

4. "Are DGMs back?", in line with government wishes, an article on the founding of criminal courts similar to the abolished DGMs is included in CMUK bill.

5. "Turkey courts EU with show of openness", Turkey's national security council (MGK), the secretive institution long regarded as the country's most powerful decision-making body, briefed diplomats and the media on its operations yesterday in an unprecedented display of transparency aimed at impressing the European Union.

6. "Turkey - waiting at the gates", in the run-up to next month's European Union summit meeting, which will also focus on the opening of accession talks with Turkey, the Dutch presidency has drafted a plan which sets out some of the conditions for those negotiations to get underway.

7. "US readies to voice support for Turkey's bid in EU capitals", in the last days of his expiring term, Secretary of State Powell is expected to express Washington’s firm support for Turkish entry into EU, a backing which has rattled Europeans in the past.

8. "Fear of ethnic conflict charges Mosul unrest", after Saddam Hussein was ousted and his security apparatus collapsed, many Iraqis predicted ethnic war. They feared ethnic militias like the Kurdish Peshmerga would fill the security vacuum and engage in a bloody power struggle.

---

1. - Los Angeles Times - "Turkey probes slayings of 2 Kurds by security forces":

A father and his son, 12, are accused of being rebels and opening fire first, but a human rights group says they were probably unarmed.

ANKARA / 30 November 2004 / by Amberin Zaman

The Turkish parliament and government officials began separate investigations Monday into security forces’ killings of a 12-year- old boy and his father, both accused of belonging to a Kurdish rebel group.

After the Nov. 21 slayings in the southeastern town of Kiziltepe, the provincial governor, Temel Kocaklar, said that "two armed terrorists" plotting attacks against military targets had died in a shootout with security forces.

But according to human rights activists, who looked into the deaths, Ahmet Kaymaz, 31, and his son Ugur were probably unarmed and may have been killed mistakenly.

In the wake of the killings, tensions between authorities and locals in Kiziltepe have been rising. On Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators calling for Kocaklar’s resignation clashed with police, and at least three were arrested and jailed on charges of disrupting public order.

The controversy comes before a crucial European Union summit Dec. 17, when EU leaders are set to decide whether to launch accession talks with Turkey.

Citing Turkey’s poor human rights record, the EU has long spurned Ankara’s demands for membership. Abuses have been especially prevalent in heavily Kurdish eastern Turkey, where rebels have led a 15-year insurgency for independence.

The rebels called off their campaign for an independent Kurdish state after the capture of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999. But they resumed their fight in September, saying Turkey had rejected their calls to negotiate a lasting peace.

Despite that setback, the Turkish government has kept up a flurry of legal reforms, winning strong praise from EU governments. The changes include stiffer penalties for torturers and broader cultural freedoms for Kurds.

But human rights groups have accused Turkish leaders of failing to enforce the new laws. Such concerns are frequently echoed by EU diplomats in the Turkish capital, who criticized the government for not taking immediate action to investigate the Kiziltepe killings.

Huseyin Guler, one of the lawmakers investigating the incident, pledged a full account. "We will report on the incident in fullest detail," he said before setting off for Kiziltepe.

As the lawmakers were meeting with the Kaymaz family, officials in the province of Hakkari, farther east, began investigating claims that a 19-year-old shepherd had been shot dead Saturday by security forces as he was tending his herd. Family members said military personnel refused to hand over the body unless they signed papers confirming that he was a terrorist. They refused.

At the same time, the government is facing calls for an inquiry into a mass grave found this month outside Alaca village in another southeastern province, Diyarbakir. Villagers allege that the remains belong to residents who disappeared in 1993 after being arrested by the army.

"These are all examples of how the government fails to stand behind its own policies," said Yusuf Alatas, chairman of Turkey’s Human Rights Assn., which conducted its own investigation of the Kiziltepe killings.

But other commentators say the government is being sabotaged by rogue elements within the state who stand to lose influence if Turkey joins the European Union. "The Kiziltepe tragedy must be assessed in this light," said Serafettin Elci, a veteran Kurdish politician.

According to the Human Rights Assn. report, Kaymaz and his son were shot dead while carrying blankets to Kaymaz’s truck, parked outside their house. Kaymaz, who had no police record, made a living transporting fuel to Iraq and had been about to set off on another trip.

"The death penalty was abolished … yet Turkish citizens continue to be executed on the streets without any justification," Ahmet Kaymaz’s brother, Resat, said in a telephone interview.

The prosecutor handling the case told rights groups that the police had been watching the Kaymaz house for some time on suspicion that rebels had been hiding out there. Although acknowledging that authorities were aware that a family with four children was living in the house, she said that Ahmet Kaymaz and his son had opened fire on security forces first and had perished in an ensuing shootout.

The autopsy found 13 bullets in the body of Ugur Kaymaz and eight in the body of his father. A neighbor, who was asked by police to identify Ugur immediately after the incident, said the boy was lying in a pool of blood near the truck and that his right hand was resting "awkwardly" on a rifle.

The neighbor, Ahmet Tekin, said police were "stunned" when he told them that Ugur was his pupil at primary school. "They kept asking me if I was sure," Tekin told the daily Radikal in an interview published Monday. "I told them I had no doubts whatsoever."

---

2. - Milliyet - "Road to EU passes from Mardin":

1 December 2004 / opinion by Mehmet Ali Birand

Ahmet Kaymaz was 30 years old. He was a truck driver in Mardin's Kiziltepe area. He was known as a Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP) member. Some members of his family were approached to become village guards, but they refused. His son, Ugur Kaymaz, was 12 years old. He was a primary school student. He was a good student with a good attendance record.
In a police operation last week, both Ahmet and Ugur Kaymaz were killed. Thirteen bullets were extracted from the body of Ugur. Nine of the bullets were fired from a distance of 50 centimeters and aimed at his back. There was a gun found near Ugur. According to his teacher, he was not grown up enough to carry such a weapon.

The Mardin governor announced that these two individuals had died in a firefight. Ugur, who was wearing slippers at the time, took part in it. That was what the governor was saying. Ugur’s mother claimed that the last time she saw her son alive was when a security officer was pushing on her son’s neck with his foot. Ugur’s teacher, who ran towards the scene after hearing gunshots, corroborated her statements.

Now is the time to listen to your conscience. This is the time to sift through the reports, to find the truth and to prove this was no assassination. We are talking about a 12-year-old boy who was killed in front of his house while saying goodbye to his father on his way to another truck run. We are talking about a father who had to stay away from his home for months to make ends meet.
The truth should be uncovered. No one should be protected or hidden from justice. The series of laws we call the Copenhagen criteria is a lifestyle. In short, it is democracy. Democracy is a regime deserved by all in the country. The government is facing a test of sincerity. The way to prove that democracy really has been established in Turkey lies in the efforts to investigate the Kaymaz murders. The road to the EU does not pass through Brussels but through Kiziltepe in Mardin.

---

3. - BBC - "Turkish torture victim speaks out":

DIYARBAKIR / 30 November / by Jonny Dymond

The well-documented use of torture - specifically the systematic use of torture by the organs of state security - was for many years one of the prime reasons for the exclusion of Turkey from European institutions.

The current government says its has "zero tolerance" for torture and has made changes to the law so that those who abuse prisoners can be more easily prosecuted.

But there is continuing controversy over whether the use of torture remains "systematic" in Turkey.

"I died twice," says Abdulkadir Aydin of the time he was tortured.

"I was hung with my hands behind my back and then electrocuted. I could smell that my body was burning.

"For seven or eight days I was tortured non-stop, passing out in-between sessions. They’d throw water on me to wake me up, or kick me."

Abdulkadir Aydin was arrested in 1980 in Diyarbakir, south-east Turkey.

He was rounded up after an army officer was killed during Nevroz, a Kurdish spring festival that was at the time banned in Turkey.

"They took me to the military court and the prosecutor was there.

"My eyes had been bound up for over eight days. When they removed the blindfold the skin came away and I couldn’t see anything.

"The prosecutor asked me whether I was involved [in the officer’s death]. I said ’no’.

"He shouted at me to shut up. So I did. Then they took me to a military prison. Two days later we had our first visitors.

"My wife and three children came. I was behind the barbed wire.

"Because there were no mirrors I did not know what I looked like. I called them to come closer."

Abdulkadir pauses. He stops talking for a minute, then leaves the room, his emotions almost overcoming him. He returns.

"A friend of mine brought a mirror a couple of days later. It was quite dramatic."

Non-stop torture

He is soft-spoken, suited, with neatly-brushed thinning pepper and salt hair.

He sits in the offices of the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association and remembers detail after detail of his time in prison.

"In the evening of 11 September 1980 they took us to prison number five, which was modern and cleaner.

"In the morning we heard that there had been a coup. Six months later the torture started again, non-stop, day and night."

"We were 80 people in a room built for 18. We were five to a bed. When we refused to wear a type of uniform we were fiercely beaten.

"The mood was very, very bad, very grim. We were all trying to survive, not to die.

"That was the focus. Our days passed by being beaten and soothing those who were being beaten."

"They brought people in who had nothing to do with politics.

"They were just at the coffee house when the police came and swept them up. Everyone was scooped up from the villages and towns.

"They kept us hungry for days. After a week they would bring us a bucket of some liquid - and they would say: ’This is your food’.

"Then they would drop two rats into the bucket and make us eat."

Stubborn

The purpose of the torture was two-fold. First was assimilation into the Turkish state, Abdulkadir says.

"They said: ’You’ll leave Marxism behind, you’ll leave you Kurdish identity, you’ll be Turkish soldiers’."

The second purpose was information. "They used it to identify the weaker ones, then they’d torture them separately."

Abdulkadir was, he says, tortured nearly constantly for three of the six years he spent in prison.

In 1986 he was released, innocent of any crime.

He began working for the fledgling Diyarbakir Human Rights Association and for the Kurdish political parties.

"The torture made me stronger and more stubborn. It made me more responsible for people and society and gave me ambition to do something.

"It also made me able to laugh at myself. Being able to laugh at myself kept me standing and alive.

’I want them punished’

"During our time thousands of people were tortured. That’s what we mean by ’systematic’.

"Today there is no such thing, but the government is protecting the torturers, the current ones.

"I cannot say the whole government has the mentality, but there are individuals in cabinet and parliament who think at the end of the day that torture is legitimate for certain people.

"There is one thing we want. Those who were responsible for what we went through, we want to see them punished.

"I don’t believe they will be. But now that’s our fight, to have them punished."

---

4. - Turkish Daily News - "Are DGMs back?":

In line with government wishes, an article on the founding of criminal courts similar to the abolished DGMs is included in CMUK bill

ANKARA / 1 December 2004

The Parliament Justice Commission, in line with government wishes, added an article on Tuesday allowing the founding of new criminal courts, similar to the controversial State Security Courts (DGM), which were abolished as part of the European Union harmonization process, to the new Criminal Procedures law (CMUK).

As the commission discussions on the CMUK continued, a three-article amendment proposal sent by the Justice Ministry on the replacement of the DGMs was included in the bill. According to the bill, the Justice Ministry will request from the Judges and Prosecutors Supreme Board the establishment of such criminal courts in certain cities, which will cover a wide region. More than one such court can be established in a single city, according to the amendment, and each court will be numbered. The members of these courts will not work at any other court.
On cases that involve state security, prosecutors assigned by the Judges and Prosecutors Supreme Board will be personally in charge of investigations and the maximum time in police custody will be 48 hours, instead of 24, for such crimes. In regions under emergency rule, the time spent in custody can be increased from 4-days up to 7-days.

Prosecutors in charge of such crimes will be able to utilize vehicles and equipment belonging to the state. Information requested by judges and prosecutors will be submitted to the court within 10 days.
Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Yüksel Çorbacioglu said that such courts did not correspond with a country that respected the rule of law. He said: “When we abolished the DGMs, we thought we were democratizing the country. Unfortunately the DGMS are returning.” CHP’s Orhan Eraslan asked why such amendments were being made to the CMUK, which was supposed to be a democratizing force.
Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek said that the abolishment of the DGM and their replacement with a new type of court had been already agreed.

Secret surveilance back in CMUK

During the session on Tuesday afternoon, the Justice Commission approved the secret surveilance clause that was rejected on Monday. The secret surveilance of suspects by security forces had drawn the ire of both ruling party and the opposition deputies on Monday, before being rejected.

The clause was reassessed on Tuesday and the secret survailance of suspects by security forces, “outside of homes,” were accepted by the commission.

---

5. - Financial Times - "Turkey courts EU with show of openness":

ANKARA / 1 December 2004 / by Vincent Boland

Turkey's national security council (MGK), the secretive institution long regarded as the country's most powerful decision-making body, briefed diplomats and the media on its operations yesterday in an unprecedented display of transparency aimed at impressing the European Union.

The briefing, the first in the MGK's 71-year history, was an opportunity to showcase one of the Turkish government's prized reforms - the ascendancy of civilian influence over the military in a country used to intermittent but forceful rule by its armed forces. It came amid an all-out, last-minute effort by Turkey to persuade the EU at its December 17 summit to allow it to become a full member of the union.

Diplomats who attended the briefing said its significance lay in the fact that it took place and that it was held so close to the EU summit. They said the government, concerned by opposition in some EU countries to Turkey's membership, wanted to signal the extent of the changes it had introduced in the past two years to make the country more democratic and acceptable to EU sensibilities.

More evidence of that opposition emerged yesterday when Wolfgang Schuessel, the Austrian chancellor, said the EU must make clear to Turkey that any negotiations may result in an arrangement other than full membership. Turkey has been battling in recent weeks to overcome this argument, which has been voiced by other European leaders.

What emerged from the MGK briefing, held at the council's heavily guarded headquarters on the outskirts of Ankara, was a glimpse of an institution in transition and unsure of what its role should be in a more democratic Turkey.

The MGK, which groups the military top brass as well as the president, the prime minister and senior government officials, was regarded for years by many Turks as a parallel government to the ones they elected. It was the institution that dictated policy towards Cyprus in the 1970s and the Kurdish insurgency of the 1980s and 90s, among issues considered vital to the republic's security.

Recent reforms removed its executive powers, lessened the presence of the military, and saw the appointment in the summer of Yigil Alpogan, a former diplomat, to be its first civilian secretary-general, responsible for day-to-day functioning. Analysts say that while the MGK's role in the governance of Turkey has been downgraded, it remains central to the still-uneasy relationship between the military and the Islamic-oriented government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister.

Mr Alpogan said the MGK's main function was to assess and advise on internal and external threats to Turkey's security, although he did not list specific threats. He also pledged "no more secrecy" about the MGK's role and function. "Transparency and openness [will be] the main characteristics of our work," he said.

---

6. - Radio Netherlands - "Turkey - waiting at the gates":

30 November 2004 / by Vanessa Mock

In the run-up to next month's European Union summit meeting, which will also focus on the opening of accession talks with Turkey, the Dutch presidency has drafted a plan which sets out some of the conditions for those negotiations to get underway.
With the plan also calling on Turkey to extend customs union to all the existing member states, including newcomer Cyprus, the draft document appears to be moving the hurdles for Turkey's possible EU membership even higher. It also recommends introducing an option to suspend the accession talks if a third of the member states so desire.

In this interview with Radio Netherlands, William Hale, lecturer in Turkish politics at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, examines whether the new plan really represents a toughening of the EU's position as regards Turkey's ambitions to join the union.

"I think we are seeing a slightly tougher stance by the Dutch presidency, but that is not to say that the European Council is going to accept the draft, verbatim, as it is given to them by the presidency."

RN: "There have obviously been some fears within the EU from some members, notably France, about Turkey's accession to the organisation. Do you think that this draft in any way reflects these concerns?"

"I dare say it reflects concerns, probably in the Netherlands as well as in France, about the whole proposal. But the point is that neither the Dutch EU presidency nor, to the best of my knowledge, the Dutch government, has reversed its previous decision that it supports the opening accession negotiations with the Turkey next year."

"There is substantial opposition in France, as you said, particularly on the part of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the party of President Jacques Chirac, against admitting Turkey to the European union. But that doesn't alter the fact that President Chirac has said on several occasions that he will support the start of accession negotiations."

RN: "Why is France sticking out its neck so much and putting its foot down as regards Turkey's accession?"

"I think there are two reasons for this. One of them is that there is a perfectly reasonable concern in France about ultra-Islamic terrorism. The point is, however, that none of this ultra-Islamic terrorism comes from Turkey. Turkey is a strong opponent of ultra-Islamic terrorism, indeed it has been the victim of ultra-Islamic terrorism itself. So, I think this point needs to be explained to the French public."

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan hopes to take his country further down the road towards full EU membership

"The second point is that, in a broader way, France is concerned about the overall enlargement of the community because it reduces the power which individual states, including France, have within the European Union. It creates the kind of looser union which is the kind of union that, on the whole, France doesn't want."

RN: "There does seem to have been a lot of to-and fro in these accession negotiations for Turkey. Is there a sense in which Ankara is getting a little bit frustrated by this indecision and in-fighting within the EU?"

"Look, Turkey has been frustrated by indecision and in-fighting within the EU on this question for pretty well 20 years. It's not something that's completely new. So far as Turkey is concerned, they recognise two things. First of all, that eventually they will have to recognise the Republic of Cyprus. They very much hope that there is a settlement in Cyprus as part of the deal, but that we can't be sure of as yet."

"The second point is that Turkey has already recognised that the EU will be keeping a close watch on the application of the democratic reforms in Turkey during the accession negotiations. This is accepted on the Turkish side, so the statement by the Dutch presidency slightly alters the terms and conditions, but it doesn't fundamentally alter the situation."

---

7. - Turkish Daily News - "US readies to voice support for Turkey's bid in EU capitals":

In the last days of his expiring term, Secretary of State Powell is expected to express Washington’s firm support for Turkish entry into EU, a backing which has rattled Europeans in the past

1 December 2004

Outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell is expected to voice his administration’s support for NATO ally Turkey’s quest to join the European Union in talks during a tour of European capitals starting next week.
The United States supports Ankara’s efforts to join the wealthy bloc, but Washington’s lobbying has rattled some Europeans in the past, with French President Jacques Chirac telling President George W. Bush not to intervene in EU affairs during a summit of NATO leaders earlier this year.

“We are not a member of the European Union, but we certainly do believe that Turkey needs to be put on a path to membership. We have made that very clear,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news conference on Monday.
Boucher said the United States does “think it is important that they set a date” but added that the United States recognized that for some of these decisions “they have to work out within the European Union.”

Powell is expected to discuss the issue of Turkish membership when he visits Belgium and the Netherlands, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, the Anatolia news agency said. He starts his Europe tour on Dec. 6, days before a critical summit that will decide whether to start accession talks with Turkey.
Turkey, a member of the EU since 1999, expects EU leaders to give the go-ahead for start of accession talks when they meet on Dec. 17 in Brussels. The EU Commission said in an Oct. 6 document that talks with Turkey should start but set tough conditions.
Going even beyond the commission’s conditions, the Dutch presidency of the EU said in a draft statement on Monday that talks would be open-ended, as the commission proposed, and said they could be suspended upon request of one-third of the members. The commission said suspension would require a two-thirds vote.

The Dutch document also said the opening of talks would depend on de facto recognition of the Greek Cypriot administration.
Boucher declined to comment on news reports that the United States is ready to push for a new initiative for a settlement in Cyprus and said there was nothing new to tell the press on the issue.
Powell’s Europe tour covers Bulgaria, where he will attend an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meeting, and Belgium, where he will attend meetings of the North Atlantic Council, the NATO-Russia Council and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.
At The Hague in the Netherlands, the secretary will attend the U.S.-European Union ministerial meeting.

---

8. - Boston Globe - "Fear of ethnic conflict charges Mosul unrest":

MOSUL / 30 November 2004 / by Thanassis Cambanis*

After Saddam Hussein was ousted and his security apparatus collapsed, many Iraqis predicted ethnic war. They feared ethnic militias like the Kurdish Peshmerga would fill the security vacuum and engage in a bloody power struggle.

Such dire predictions failed to materialize in the 18 months following Hussein’s fall. But the recent explosion of violence in this ethnically divided northern city has deteriorated to the brink of widespread ethnic conflict.

The rising tensions spilled over last week as the corpses of Iraqi soldiers, many of them Kurds, continued to pile up in the streets of Mosul. Most of them were killed by single gunshots to the head. Some were beheaded. The prime suspects are Arab Islamists allied with local Ba’athists, operating in the Old City on Mosul’s west bank.

Just across the Tigris River, a battalion of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters mustered before their commander in Kurdish-controlled east Mosul, presenting arms and bellowing assent.

"We are here to defend our people. We will fight, and we will win," their commander, Sadi Ahmed Pire, shouted at the 150 fighters crammed into the courtyard of his headquarters. "The Kurds of Mosul will not be second-class citizens."

"We are ready to defend our brothers!" the soldiers chanted in unison.

These scenes explain why Brigadier General Carter Ham, America’s top military commander in the north, said he thinks ethnic war is still possible in Mosul.

American officers blame the untamed insurgency against the interim Iraqi government and their US protectors on a lethal marriage of convenience between a reconstituted Ba’ath Party and a well-developed Islamic movement in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.

While the Americans have tolerated the unofficial presence of thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga, who don’t fall under Iraqi central government command, they worry that Mosul’s volatile mix could touch off wider ethnic carnage.

A resurgent Ba’ath Party has made deep inroads in a population already sympathetic to Arab Islamist movements, American officials say. These same officials fear that intensified presence of powerful Kurdish paramilitaries could provoke the alliance of Ba’athists and Islamists to declare open war on Mosul’s Kurds and escalate ethnic violence in the city.

In fact, some US and Kurdish commanders suspect the dozens of assassinated Iraqi soldiers are the first step in a terror campaign against the city’s minorities.

According to Ham, Ba’athists and Islamist terror groups like that led by Jordanian Abu Musab al Zarqawi have united in Mosul to try to provoke ethnic war among Sunni Arabs on one side and the city’s minorities on the other: Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrian Christians, and Yezidis.

"Zarqawi stated that a specific goal of his organization is to create ethnic strife, and specifically Arab-Kurd," Ham said. "The former regime elements also use that to their advantage."

Like Baghdad, Mosul straddles the Tigris and boasts a top-notch university. On the west bank, the river and a major highway encircle a labyrinthine old city of crumbling mud homes studded with minarets. American armored Stryker vehicles rarely venture into this quarter, and can’t fit in many of its narrower alleys. Ba’athists, Islamists, and other insurgent groups launched many of the last month’s attacks from Old Mosul.

The city was the intellectual cradle of both the Ba’ath Party and the Islamic Brotherhood, a pan-Arab radical movement, and the city’s million-plus population supplied hundreds of thousands of loyalists for Hussein’s military and security services.

Insurgents nearly took over Mosul’s government headquarters on Nov. 11, and most of the city’s police defected or joined the resistance. After four days of clashes, the insurgents withdrew from the battle, and have turned to a relentless assassination campaign targeting Iraqi soldiers and others who work with American forces or Kurdish Peshmerga.

More than 50 bodies have been discovered in the past month, US commanders in Mosul said.

In response to the threat, the Kurdish community consolidated its military control, dispatching thousands of troops to Mosul from elsewhere in the Kurdish north and directly joining forces with the US Army to identify insurgent targets in the city. The Kurds built up a virtual government and a substantial paramilitary force in the years following the 1991 Gulf War, when the United States created a no-fly zone over Kurdish territory to neutralize Hussein’s forces.

Ham has adopted unorthodox tactics against the latest violence.

Officially, he said there are no Peshmerga in the city, only Iraqi National Guard soldiers who happen to be ethnic Kurds from neighboring provinces.

"You have seen, in the reporting, lots of reports that the Peshmerga are coming to Mosul," Ham said. "I think these statements are made by those who wish to incite the Sunni Arab people of Mosul and create fear and instability."

But last weekend, Ham toured his area of operations and met with top Kurdish leaders from both parties. He left Pire’s compound just as 150 Peshmerga from the Kurdish mountain city of Koya arrived to relieve another unit that had already been in Mosul 10 days.

Ham is also sharing information officially with the Kurdish parties, who have developed their own underground networks of spies and informants in the city.

US troops need to conduct pinpoint raids against the insurgency in Mosul, Ham said.

"The intelligence necessary to do that is tough to come by," Ham said. "As Americans, it is really tough to come by."

So, he said, US forces have relied on the two major Kurdish parties for much for their intelligence.

But the strategy risks destabilizing the city’s fragile ethnic equilibrium. Kurds have greatly expanded their sphere of influence on the east bank of the river. Assyrian Christians and Kurds cooperate closely with the US military in the city, while Arabs have mostly stayed away from jobs in the security forces.

A Sunni Arab who works with the American forces and wanted only his first name, Yasin, to be published, said that Islamists had targeted collaborators for execution -- translators, National Guard soldiers, Kurds.

"The Ba’athists aren’t trying to kill us. They’re trying to recruit us," he said. "They’re already looking ahead to the future, when they think they will rule the city."

Ham echoed that assessment: "I think the Ba’athists would like to get control; I think the religious extremists would prefer to have no control."

In the Kurdish part of Mosul, Peshmerga and ethnic Kurds in the Iraqi National Guard are chomping at the bit to expand their role in the city -- and to challenge the Ba’athists.

"If the Americans authorized us, we could control the city," said Hussein Kochar, a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan official in Pire’s office. "On our side of the river the Peshmerga control the streets, but they haven’t started liquidating the Ba’athists yet."

Pire’s Peshmerga troops are under strict orders not to overstep their mandate. Only Iraqi National Guard soldiers are allowed to officially arrest people, and the Peshmerga are not allowed to confiscate other Iraqis’ weapons.

On the Arab west bank of the river, the contrast is stark.

In that half of Mosul, only 200 police officers remain on the job out of a force of 5,000 before the November uprising, said Lieutenant Colonel Erik Kurilla, commander of US forces in the Old City.

Kurilla’s soldiers, and some Iraqis, now occupy the police stations and are cleaning out the charred wreckage.

"The police could come back here, but the fear is they move back in and torch it," Kurilla said. "Do we have to have a permanent [Iraqi National Guard] presence at the police stations?"

A man named Khalid, an Assyrian Christian translator who used to work at the police stations until they were taken over by insurgents, said that on the day of the attacks at least three different bands -- each declaring, "We are the real mujahideen!" -- came to the police stations demanding that officers give them their weapons.

But all three groups were too late: the police had surrendered their arsenals the day before to Ba’athists, Khalid said.

Now, two dozen shivering Iraqi National Guard soldiers protect the New Mosul neighborhood branch police station, on the edge of the old city.

Four soldiers stood guard on the street on a recent day, while the rest clustered around the station’s single kerosene heater, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests looted from the police station’s storeroom.

American soldiers provide the real protection, with snipers and heavy machine guns arrayed on the station’s roof.

Kurilla is optimistic that US forces, working with Iraqi National Guard and informants, will be able to defuse the cells of Ba’athists, foreign fighters, and indigenous terror groups in the city and prevent widespread ethnic carnage or tit-for-tat killings between Arabs and Kurds.

Last week, a pair of Kurdish informants rode around the city in armored Stryker vehicles identifying targets for US hits. Sweeps over the last few days in villages surrounding Mosul have yielded the arrests of 67 suspects.

But the flow of dead bodies hasn’t ceased.

Ham said he doesn’t think Iraqi forces will be in a position to provide needed security any time soon, certainly not by the scheduled Jan. 30 national election.

At a meeting of his commanders, Ham said it would take five years to rebuild the police, Kurilla said.

"Now we have the fairly daunting task of rebuilding a legitimate and loyal police force in the city," Ham said. "That’s going to take a long time, and we don’t have a long time."

* Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.