1. "Iranian security forces clash with PKK", the agency said the fighting took place on Monday in an area close to the country's border with Turkey. It did not say wheather there were any PKK casualties.

2. "Dutch justice ministry to appeal ban on extradition of Kurdish leader", the Dutch justice ministry is to appeal a court ruling that a senior member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) could not be extradited to Turkey, a ministry spokesman told AFP Tuesday.

3. "Turkey stung by European rights court", Turkey was reprimanded by the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday over a case dating back to 1996 in which a man was put in prison for writing an article critical of the state.

4. "'New' Turkey, mostly Asian, eyes Europe", the Middle East's largest country and straddling both Europe and Asia, crucial U.S. ally Turkey is undergoing big changes.

5. "Journalist Sirin is Released", Journalist Sirin, who was sentenced to 17.5 years for being a member of an illegal organization, and who has been in prison for 8.5 years, was released due to amendments to the Turkish Penal Code.

6. "Religious Appeals Have Turned Against The Kurds", Kill a Jew. Kill a Kurd.

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1. - Turkish Daily News - "Iranian security forces clash with PKK":

ANKARA / 10 November 2004

A member of the Iranian security forces was wounded in a clash with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK/KONGRA-GEL) members inside Iran, Anatolia news agency reported yesterday.

The agency said the fighting took place on Monday in an area close to the country's border with Turkey. It did not say wheather there were any PKK casualties.

Eight members of the PKK infiltrated Iran from Iraq before clashing with security forces, it said without providing more details.

Turkish officials say the PKK maintains bases in the rugged mountains of northern Iraq that borders both Iran and Turkey. Ankara seeks Iraqi Kurdish groups, the interim Iraqi administration and U.S. troops there to take action to root out the bases since the PKK members infiltrate from there bases to Turkey and Iran. Turkish authorities earlier expressed satisfaction with Tehran's stance on fighting the PKK within its territory.

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2. - AFP - "Dutch justice ministry to appeal ban on extradition of Kurdish leader":

THE HAGUE / 9 November 2004

The Dutch justice ministry is to appeal a court ruling that a senior member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) could not be extradited to Turkey, a ministry spokesman told AFP Tuesday.

On Monday a court in The Hague ruled that Nuriye Kesbir could not be extradited to Turkey because there were not enough guarantees that she would be fairly treated.

"We will not resign ourselves to the verdict. The ministry of justice will lodge a rush appeal," spokesman Wim Kok said.

The ministry has four weeks to launch the so-called rush appeal and then it is up to the court to set a date for a hearing, Kok explained.

Turkey accuses Kesbir of being behind at least 25 attacks between 1993 and 1995 on military targets in eastern Turkey, where the PKK party is fighting for Kurdish self-rule.

In September, Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner said he had agreed to a Turkish request to extradite Kesbir after a May ruling by the Dutch supreme court that she could be sent to Turkey to stand trial.

Kesbir challenged the decision to extradite her and on Monday the court ruled in her favour.

The judge said the Dutch government should not have taken Turkish diplomatic assurances of fair treatment at face value.

He pointed to reports from diplomats and several human rights organisations alleging that Turkey was still violating human rights, despite undertaking a series of judicial reforms.

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3. - AFP - "Turkey stung by European rights court":

STRASBOURG / 9 November 2004

Turkey was reprimanded by the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday over a case dating back to 1996 in which a man was put in prison for writing an article critical of the state.

The court decided that the man's right to freedom of expression had been violated after he was given a 20-month jail term and fined in December 1996 over the article, which appeared in an Istanbul weekly.

The man, 48, who was not named, was convicted by the state security court in Istanbul at the time of writing "propaganda against the unity of the Turkish nation."

The article was notably critical of the political repercussions the possible adhesion of Turkey to the European Union could have on the Kurdish question.

While stating that parts of the article "painted an extremely negative image of the Turkish state" and were "hostile", the court stressed that they "did not encourage violence, armed resistance or insurrection and did not constitute hate speech." The court concluded that the conviction was "disproportionate."

The man, who now lives in Germany, was awarded 5,000 euros (6,500 dollars) damages.

EU leaders will decide on December 17 whether to start accession negotiations with the mainly Muslim nation, a membership candidate since 1999.

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4. - Paradise Post - "'New' Turkey, mostly Asian, eyes Europe":

8 November 2004 / by Lowell Blankfort

The Middle East's largest country and straddling both Europe and Asia, crucial U.S. ally Turkey is undergoing big changes. Lowell Blankfort, a prize-winning writer and former Post co-owner, and his wife April have just returned from a three-week reporting trip there. This is the first of a series of articles.

Viewed from a cruise ship's deck, my first sight of Turkey is a huge black statue on a fog-shrouded hillside, barely discernible amidst the early-morning mist that shrouds the small Aegean Sea port of Kusadasi.
The statue's right arm points northeastward, toward our ultimate destination this morning, the ruins of ancient Ephesus, now 12 miles inland but Asia Minor's greatest port 2,600 years ago. Before tide-carried silt deposits separated it from the sea, Ephesus was the gateway of European traders venturing eastward to seek access to the wandering tribes and riches of long-ago Asia.
Today, Turks are trying to reverse that process. A poor nation 99 percent Muslim and 93 percent in Asia, Turkey is looking westward, seeking to join the 25-country "club of Christian nations," the rich European Union. Calling this "a reconciliation between civilizations," Turks hope membership will open up trade opportunities for Turkish firms, invite more foreign investment, enhance the nation's prestige, boost incomes that are barely a fifth of Europeans - and facilitate Turkey becoming a "bridge" between Christian Europe and an increasingly restive Arab Muslim world beset with hate-spewing fundamentalists.
Europeans are hardly unanimous in their eagerness to accept the Turks. But there's no doubt that the Turkish national hero honored in that hillside statue would have welcomed the effort - and most (though not all) of the profound and positive changes already occurring in a Turkey of 71 million people revolutionizing itself to meet European standards.

General Mustafa Kemal - renamed simply Ataturk, "Father of All Turks" by Parliament in the 1920's - salvaged today's bigger-than-Texas-sized Turkey from the ruins of its defeated Ottoman Empire after World War I.
Gone was a vast empire that lasted longer and at its peak was larger than either the Roman or British empire - and had held sway over the entire Balkans, all of North Africa and the entire Arab Middle East for 450 years.
Ataturk, who overthrew the once-omnipotent sultan, said Turkey lost its empire because it was obsessively religious and old-fashioned.
He vowed to remake the new Turkish Republic into "a normal modern nation" and one "modeled on Europe."
During his 15 years as dictator-president, secularism became Turkey's new religion.
Ataturk moved the capital from Istanbul, the former Constantinople redolent with mosques and religious history, to Ankara, a small city hundreds of miles east of the Islamic power structure. He shut down the dominant Muslim caliphate, put its imams on the government payroll to better control what they preached, banned religious headscarves for women and fezzes for men, converted the alphabet from Arabic into Latin, and moved the day of rest to Sunday from the Muslim Friday.
Today, ironically, Turkey's attempt to fulfill Ataturk's secular, European dream is being led by a devout Muslim. When Prime Minister Recep Rayip Erdogan (pronounced Ehr-duh-won) was mayor of Istanbul, he was jailed in 1999 and banned from public life for three years for reciting in public a poem that talked of Muslim minarets as bayonets - deemed an incitement to a religious uprising.
But only three years later, fed up with corrupt politicians and a sick economy, Turkish voters gave a huge victory to Erdogan's new Justice and Development Party, ostensibly secular but many of whose leaders were those of a more militantly Muslim party deposed by the army in 1997.
Aided by the votes of newly politicized devout rural Muslims who were swarming into the cities, Erdogan's party, in a multi-party election, won 38 percent of votes and almost two-thirds of legislative seats.
Paradoxically, because he was still on probation, Erdogan had to wait several months after his party's victory before assuming the prime ministry. Moreover, because his wife insists on wearing headscarves, she is barred from attending government functions.

Still, to all Turks, religious or not, almost three quarters of a century after his untimely death from alcoholism in 1938 at the age of 57, Ataturk remains a virtual deity. Large photos of him bedeck every classroom, huge statues of him dominate public squares in every city and town, portraits of him on glass or on plates or in oil or watercolors decorate walls and mantelpieces throughout the country.

It is slightly before dusk, the end of an ordinary September weekday, at Ankara's massive two-square-block Ataturk Mausoleum and Museum.
But even this late the crowds are huge and the lines are long to view his coffin. Many on line have come from the provinces and are dressed very formally, as if going to visit the great man himself, rather than simply his coffin.
I think back to when I viewed the preserved waxed bodies of Lenin in Moscow and Mao Zedong in Beijing.
There the crowds are hustled along by guards after a quick look.
But here, even though there is no body to see, those on line pause long and solemnly before the coffin, to think some thoughts, be in touch with their own feelings, as they savor the moment. Many have cameras, and husbands take pictures of wives, and wives of husbands, and then of the children, before the coffin that was the resting place of the remains of Turkey's greatest hero.
Some simply stand and stare, their eyes visibly swelling up with tears.

In a nation of uncertain ethnic identity for most, Ataturk had little patience for the problems of ethnic minorities or disputes over where Turks came from.
To him, every resident of the Turkish Republic should simply consider himself a Turk. And those who weren't were kicked out in 1920's exchanges of population (except in cities) -- even though the families of many, like those of Greek ancestry, had lived in Turkey for hundreds of years.
Same for the Armenians who had been the target of a genocide or at least a massacre a decade earlier. Ataturk was hardly a devotee of democracy.
He ruled with a heavy hand, backed up by a military lionized by the population for having retaken a lot of Turkish land lost during World War I.
He did not hesitate to be tough or torture or execute his political enemies. Turkey did not have an election for more than a decade after he assumed office and remained a one-party state, Ataturk's party, until 1946, some 23 years after he took power and eight years after his death.
Ataturk's constitution provided a special role for the military, as guardians of the nation's secularism and stability. Under it, the military forcibly overthrew elected (and corrupt and unpopular) governments in 1960, 1970 and 1980, and forced the resignation in 1997 of a coalition government headed by an avowedly devout prime minister.
But the European Union insists on tight civilian control over the military.
So, officially at least, the Turkey's conscripted military, half a million strong, this year was defanged - with its consent, the constitution was changed to take away its majority and chairmanship of the all-powerful National Security Council.
Still, many Turks view the military favorably, noting that even under the sultans its officer corps attracted Turkey's best and brightest, that it has been a hedge against corrupt and inept leaders, and that when it has seized power, it has relinquished it to civilians after relatively short periods.
The military's declining influence is costing it money. This year, for the first time in modern Turkey's 81-year history, the nation will spend more on education than on defense.
It also proved costly to the United States which last year wanted to use Turkey as a base for 62,000 troops to invade Iraq from the north.
Insiders say the Turkish military backed the U.S. request and in the old days would have gotten its wish.
But, mindful that Turkish public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed, the Turkish Parliament turned down the Americans (by one vote).

Turkey first applied for European Union membership in 1987 but let its application languish because tariff-protected Turkish companies were reluctant to abide by European free-trade rules.
But when, with its economy faltering, it revived its application in 2001, the EU made clear that Turkey would have to start cleaning up its act if it were to be considered.
To comply, Parliament in September adopted an entirely new, more humane penal code. It reduced hundreds of draconian sentences, outlawed torture (long a staple of Turkish police interrogations), banned the death penalty, wiped out censorship laws and restrictions on free speech, eliminated barriers to expressions of ethnic identity and required juveniles who break the law to be treated in juvenile courts until 18 (before, they were treated as criminals as young as 15). Gone too were laws that provided more severe penalties for abuse of virgins than non-virgins.
"Nowhere in the world have so many laws that affect you from the day you are born until the day you die been passed in such a rush," said Sezgin Tankirikulu, Bar Association president in Dyarbakir, a stronghold of the long-persecuted Kurdish minority, about the new penal codes and civil codes rushed through to meet European Union deadlines.
Unfortunately, he added, the codes don't allow a lot of time (a month for the civil code, six months for the penal one) for judges and the public to easily adapt.
But many Turks are delighted.
"The best thing about our EU application," said a prominent Turk who asked to remain anonymous "isn't that it will open up a huge market for our products or that we'll get economic support to elevate our standard of living. That's all years away. The best thing is that they've pressured us into doing the things that we should have been doing on our own initiative decades ago."
But some people aren't so sure.

Professor Muntaz Soysal is a man of principle. That's why we're interviewing him in his tiny office in a small newspaper where he is a columnist; he used to be a columnist for Turkey's biggest newspaper but the owner fired him, he said, because he refused to use his political contacts to further the owner's business dealings.
And principle is why, at 75. he is founding a new political party.
He thinks that his previous party, the junior party in a two-party parliament, in its eagerness to embrace the EU, is betraying Ataturk's principles.
But the allegedly betrayed principle that the four of us interviewing Soysal found most curious (my wife and I were joined on the reporting trip by Professor Richard Feinberg, a former member of President Clinton's National Security Council, and his wife) was Soysal's defense of a military establishment that imprisoned him for a year and a half after its 1970 coup.
Soysal explained he was dean of the faculty at Ankara University when military officers accused him of "subverting youth" - because, he explained, they objected to the university curriculum that included readings about the world's communist regimes.
Nevertheless, Soysal, son of a naval officer says, "The military is one of the few progressive forces in Turkey that, despite its occasional mistakes and the fact that it can be cruel, has very little corruption compared with other sectors, is a force for progress and enjoys the respect and confidence of the people."
Soysal says the Erdogan government is using the European Union as an excuse to undermine the military.
He is not necessarily opposed to Turkey joining the EU, he says, but as a Turkish nationalist follower of Ataturk, he is opposed to its emphasis on globalization and business privatization - he believes the Turkish people are better off with Turkey's government, not profit-seeking companies and particularly not foreign ones, in control of its crucial resources and economic sectors. He also objects to the EU's stress on the rights of ethnic groups and minorities.

Turkey's application to join the European Union got a boost last month when the European Commission, the EU's executive body, ruled that Turkey had made enough progress toward fulfilling EU standards to merit beginning long-term negotiations, taking 10 to 15 years, toward eventual membership.
In a ringing endorsement, the commission's president, Italy's Romano Prodi, said, "We cannot imagine a Europe in which Turkey is not firmly aboard."
But the decision survived some harrowing moments when, in adopting the new penal code, the Erodogan government inserted a clause to criminalize adultery.
It said legal punishment (three years in prison) for adultery would diminish "honor killings" still sometimes imposed in rural Turkey by relatives against women whose extra-marital sexual activities are frowned upon.
Faced with opposition from women's groups and from legislators, large numbers of whom Turkish newspapers said had mistresses (Islam permits up to four wives, though Turkish law doesn't), the government capitulated when EU officials declared that criminalizing adultery would contravene European standards - i.e., be a deal-breaker.
Still, the Financial Times said the adultery proposal underscored a major problem in Turkey joining the European Union - "Turkey is becoming a re-religious society in a post-religious Europe."
If this is true, it would undercut a major reason of Europeans favoring Turkey's EU entry - that it would be an example to fundamentalist-leaning Middle East countries that secularization offers economic advantages and international acceptance.
Next month, on Dec. 17, the European Parliament will make a final decision on whether to begin serious negotiations with Turkey. One big problem Europe faces is the disparity in Turkey's economy - the European Union subsidizes its poorer countries to bring about mutual prosperity; with a European's average annual income now over five times a Turk's $4,000 per person, this could become expensive.
The income gap was even greater only three years ago when Turkey's economy was in chaos. It's less now but, if they act quickly, foreign visitors can still enjoy a unique pleasure, a hangover from the bad old days.

Wanna feel like a millionaire, spend like a millionaire? It's pretty easy in today's Turkey. The country has the world's highest-denomination banknotes,
Simply exchange $10, for example, and instantly you have 1,500,000 Turkish lira. That's enough to buy a decent American breakfast in a good restaurant along Istanbul's up-scale Istiklal Boulevard, including tip and some Turkish touches like feta cheese, olives and yogurt. If you're into Turkish carpets, you could even feel like a billionaire. A thousand-dollar carpet, for example, comes to 1.5 billion lira.
That's because decades of runaway inflation saw prices escalating as much as 70 percent annually over many years.
But, thanks to belt-tightening measures that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded in return for big loans, the annual inflation rate has tumbled to below 10 percent - lowest since the early 1930s. That's good news to Turks whose salary increases constantly was lagging behind price increases but bad news for those who like to continue to feel like millionaires or billionaires.
Convinced the currency is now stable, the government on Jan. 1 will issue new currency knocking off the last six digits on lira notes; thus 15,000,000 lira will become simply 15 lira. But it will require the same $10 to buy the same breakfast.

Before the IMF bailout, the Turkish government in 2001 owed so much money that it faced bankruptcy.
In return for the loan, the IMF offered - indeed ordered-tough love...a slash in government expenses that included many employee layoffs, government takeover of banks loaded with uncollectable loans, opening the Turkish market to foreign companies, ending
Ataturk-legacy protectionism, privatizing many state-owned enterprises, enforcing tax laws long collecting dust on the shelves but not collecting money for the treasury.
Not all of these measures are fully operative, and some have increased unemployment but their start and the consequent currency stability has sent the Turkish stock market soaring and interest rates tumbling, encouraging a whopping 8 percent growth in the economy this year.
Interest rates, 70 percent at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, in 18 months have dropped by almost two-thirds, to below 25 percent. The Iraq war has helped.
Turkey, bordering Iraq, is the world's biggest overland conduit for Iraqi food and other supplies.
Despite several tragic killings and hostage-taking of drivers, almost a thousand Turkish trucks, traveling in convoys, regularly funnel goods to Iraq.
At the start of the last century, Turkey was called "the sick man of Europe." Though its Ottoman Empire still held most of the Balkans, Turkey by then had lost Greece as well as Egypt, the Balkans were restive, Russia armies were nipping at its heels, and its economy was collapsing.
Today, Europeans who question Turkey's European Union overtures wonder whether Turkey, sick or not, is even European, in fact and at heart.
Former French President Giscard d'Estaing, for example, says Turkey is not a European country and its EU membership would mean "the end of Europe."
Only 7 percent of its land lies in Europe and, questioners contend, its legacy of torture, militarism, executions and disrespect of human rights indicate a lack of European values.
They also wonder whether the European Union should extend itself to the very borders of troubled Middle East countries like Iran, Syria and Iraq, all of which abut Turkey, or whether, on the other hand, this might influence these important resource-rich nations positively in a democratic non-fundamentalist direction.
But, with or without Turkey, Europeans will have no choice in interacting with Muslims, integration supporters point out.
About 20 million Muslims already live in Europe, and with low European birth rates presaging a severe future labor shortage, demographers say Europe could well have a majority Muslim population by the end of this century. So can it much longer call itself a Christian continent?
Meanwhile, though, Turkey's shadow looms large. With 71 million people and growing, it will soon be more populous than any single European country.
Under the EU's proposed population-based weighted voting system, it thus could be decisive in forming alliances with other countries to become the biggest factor in determining European political and economic policies.

The European Parliament will weigh all of these factors Dec. 17. Even as European leaders assure their own dubious people that it would be a long time before Turkey is admitted (and at the time would be subject to referendum in some countries), those close to the scene expect Turkey to get the unanimous go-ahead that is required to start serious talks.
"It's irreversible," said Ozdem Sanberk, over coffee in our Istanbul hotel. Sanberk was Turkey's ambassador to Great Britain for 10 years and is now a think-tank leader and TV personality. He added, "It is impossible to continue to hold Turkey in uncertainty in perpetuity."
And if Turkey is rejected - if not on Dec. 17, some time later?
Some say, I note, that Turkey's rejection would be viewed by Arab terrorists as confirming their view that the West is anti-Muslim and even anti-Arab (though Turkey is not an Arab country).
"It is difficult to foresee the consequence once hope is lost," Sanberk replied. "A surge of anti-western activity in Turkey? A turning of the Turks to Arab nations? An internal battle between the middle class and the religious? A breakup of the country into something like the Arab emirates?
Once Pandora's box is opened, the repercussions are severe. But I don't foresee anything bad happening.
Turkey is pinning its hopes on Europe and I don't think the Europeans will let us down."

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5. - Bianet - "Journalist Sirin is Released":

Journalist Sirin, who was sentenced to 17.5 years for being a member of an illegal organization, and who has been in prison for 8.5 years, was released due to amendments to the Turkish Penal Code.

ANKARA / 9 November 2004 / by Erol Onderoglu

Journalist Nureddin Sirin, who was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for "being a leader of the Tevhit-Selam organization," was released due to amendments to the Turkish Penal Code (TCK). Under the new penal code, which will go into effect in April 2005, Sirin's sentence would be reduced by half.

On the other hand, lawyer Haci Ali Ozhan for Sirin, applied to the prosecutors of the Supreme Court of Appeals and demanded that the 20 month prison sentence handed to Sirin and approved by the Supreme Court of Appeals with majority of votes is corrected.

Sirin was convicted based on article 312 of the TCK, for "inducing animosity and enmity" by writing an article titled, "Satanism or Kemalism" published in the now-closed weekly "Selam" newspaper.

Sirin has applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in another case where he is accused of being a member of the "Hezbullah" group. He is also facing charges at the Supreme Court of Appeals in one other media trial. Sirin was sentenced to prison for the same charges after writing an article titled, "We should support the oppressed even if he/she is an atheist," published in the "Selam" newspaper.

Sirin, arrested in 1997, was at the Kandira prison.

Mehmet Kutlular, the owner of the "Yeni Asya" (New Asia) newspaper, who was sentenced to two years in prison for saying the August 1999 earthquake was "godly justice," also applied to the Supreme Court of Appeals and demanded that the decision is corrected.

The new TCK will go into effect on April 1

The new TCK, which will go into effect on April 1, 2005, a new article numbered 216 will replace the current article 312. The article, titled, "inciting animosity and enmity or insulting," will read as follows:

"An individual, who openly incites animosity and enmity among a part of the community with different social status, race, religious, or from a different sect or region, against another part of the community, will be sentenced to one to three years in prison if his behavior creates open and imminent threat to the public security."

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6. - Belfast Telegraph - "Religious Appeals Have Turned Against The Kurds":

America failing test of history as offensive compared to terror tactics of pariah states

SULEIMANIA / 9 November 2004 / by Charles Glass

Muslim fundamentalist insurgents seeking to topple the government are holed up in a conservative city with little sympathy for secularism or pluralism. They raise the banner of Islam, and they call on the rest of the country to rise up and expel the oppressors. The government reacts by massing forces around the city. It demanded that the militants surrender or the city give them up. If not, the city would be destroyed. Fallujah this week? Yes, but it was also the Syrian city of Hama in the spring of 1982.

The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood seized Hama as the first step towards its goal of a national uprising against the secular Baathist regime. The Syrian President demanded their surrender. His army shelled the city, and special forces went in to kill or capture the militants. The Syrians employed the same strategy that the US is using now. Its tanks and artillery waited outside the city; they fired on militants and civilians alike. Its elite units, like the American Marines surrounding Falljuah today, braced themselves for a bloody battle.

The US condemned Syria for the assault that is believed to have cost 10,000 civilian lives. The Syrian army destroyed the historic centre of Hama, and it rounded up Muslim rebels for imprisonment or execution. Syria's actions against Hama came to form part of the American case that Syria was a terrorist state. Partly because of Hama, Syria is on a list of countries in the Middle East whose regimes the US wants to change.

Iraq's American-appointed Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, declared a state of emergency on Sunday to assume powers reminiscent of those wielded by Saddam Hussein: to break up public gatherings, enter private houses without warrants and detain people without trial. Perhaps in waging war against the Iraqis who want to expel the Americans and topple America's chosen Iraqi leaders, the insurgents have compelled the US and its Iraqi allied regime to behave like the two Baathist regimes that they believed were so totalitarian they had to go.

Other Iraqi cities must now fear the use of what The New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman called "Hama rules" against them. Unrest in the northern city of Mosul, where relations between its Kurdish and Arab residents have deteriorated to the point where Arabs on the west bank of the Tigris and Kurds to the west rarely cross the bridges to each other's neighbourhoods. Already, because the autonomous Kurds of northern Iraq are the only ethnic group allied to the US in Iraq, Arabs have begun killing Kurds. And Kurds are seeking refuge in the Kurdish-controlled northern region.

Mosul was the social base [of the Baath], said the deputy leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Noshirwan Ali Moustafa, in Suleimania. "There were 24,000 military officers from Mosul. The city is very poor. People went into the army and government service."

With the army disbanded and most of the civil service unemployed, thousands of young men in Mosul have no work. The insurgents have made strong appeals to them to change their conditions by expelling the Americans. Religious appeals have turned against the Kurds.

Residents report that graffiti in Mosul has appeared saying: "Kill a Jew. Kill a Kurd."

Insurgent forces in Falluja are connected to those already in Mosul, the interior minister of the Kurdistan Democratic Party's government in the Kurdish region, Karim Sinjari. Sinjari, said. Abu Musab Zarqawi's representative in Mosul, a man he called Abu Talha, was actively promoting attacks on US forces there, he said.

"They [Islamic militants] exist in Fallujah, Baghdad and especially Mosul. Right now, a majority of the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam people are in Mosul. From Mosul, they want to carry out operations in Dohuk and Arbil. They have carried out two operations against this ministry." Mr Sinjari referred to two suicide bombings aimed at himself in the past year.

The Iraqi forces with the Americans outside Falluja include Kurds, but the Kurdish leadership has been careful to avoid sending Kurdish units into battle against Arabs. They fear a backlash against the estimated two million Kurds who live in Arab areas such as Baghdad, Mosul and Samarra.

William Polk, who served President John Kennedy in the state department, wrote recently: "Most Iraqis regard the government as an American puppet. The idea that America can fashion a local militia to accomplish what its powerful army cannot do is not policy but fantasy."