Gunmen battled U.S. and Iraqi troops around five major bridges across the Tigris River in the northern provincial capital of Mosul on Thursday, capping a week of mounting violence that has some local officials worried Iraq's third largest city is becoming another Fallujah. "The same terrorists who are in Fallujah are coming to Mosul," said Kosrat Rasool Ali, a prominent leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the eastern half of the pro-U.S. autonomous Kurdish region. "They are reorganizing themselves; they are coordinating with the other groups. " Mosul, at one time a postwar model for U.S. occupation, has seen innumerable roadside blasts, car bombs, assassination attempts against local officials and drive-by shootings at U.S. troops and Iraqi forces in recent months. But violence escalated dramatically after the U.S. ground assault on Fallujah began Sunday night. Two U.S. soldiers were killed Tuesday in a mortar attack on a nearby base. On Wednesday, Mosul authorities imposed an indefinite curfew, closed bridges and public buildings after gunmen attacked a police station and killed three officers. An Iraqi national guardsman died, an unnamed foreigner working for a private security company was killed in an assault on a U.S. military convoy, and a Turkish truck driver was killed and his rig burned outside town.
On Thursday, masked gunmen roamed the streets, setting police cars on fire, ransacking five police stations and looting the buildings of weapons, ammunition and body armor, witnesses said. Saadi Ahmed, a senior member of the pro-U.S. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said some Mosul police officers turned their stations over to the attackers. "The internal security forces ... are a failure and are ineffective because some of them are cooperating with the terrorists," Ahmed said.