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MOSUL, IRAQ

For troops, scenes of gratitude and bursts of gunfire

By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 4/13/2003

t's one thing to take a city without a shot being fired. It's another thing to keep it that way, as US troops entering Mosul found out yesterday, a day after Saddam Hussein's army disappeared without a fight. The US troops that rode into the heart of Mosul yesterday appeared ready for both a welcome reception and a rough time in Iraq's third largest city, which has been ravaged by two days of looting and sporadic violence.

The Americans smiled and waved at the crowds that had assembled as they took up positions at crowded intersections in their off-road vehicles. When some Iraqis took pictures of the troops, an American soldier took out a camera and snapped a shot of the grinning men.

But the US troops also wore full combat gear and held their machine guns at the ready. It was a good thing, as the snapshots soon turned to potshots.

On a street near Mosul's Republican Hospital, a muddy US Land Rover drew machine-gun fire from a building 100 yards down the road. The US vehicle turned and sped toward the shooting. Later, the same vehicle was seen prowling a side street, a US soldier taking aim with its machine gun.

At a central intersection, a seemingly friendly crowd milled around two US vehicles with large American flags. Then, an Iraqi man climbed a flagpole and waved his country's flag just a few yards away.

"Iraq! Iraq! God is great!" shouted the crowd, until pro-American Kurdish fighters shot over their heads to chase the Iraqis away.

The difficulty of keeping the peace hit home at the base the Americans had set up at Mosul's ransacked airport.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Waltemeyer, commander of the US special operations force charged with securing Mosul, had just finished a meeting with prominent tribal sheiks.

Waltemeyer was about to brief reporters when two men in traditional Arab garb burst into the base, shouting loudly and angrily and waving disturbing photographs of dead men.

"Salah! Salah! Come here!" shouted one of the men, indicating one of the officials who had been speaking with Waltemeyer. "Salah, you killed my brother!"

Someone explained that Salah is a former Iraqi colonel who now cooperates with the Americans. The two men were accusing him of having worked as a security officer in Hussein's dreaded Mukhabarat, who executed their relatives.

Special forces commandos, who had been watching with taciturn disinterest as journalists and Kurdish fighters milled about the base, snapped into action at the shouting.

"Get everybody the [expletive] out of this parking lot," snarled an officer. The commandos cleared everyone out.