By Sunday, the dawn of a three-day festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, control over sections of the city remained in doubt. In streets emptied by fear and gunfire, insurgents battled hundreds of Iraqi National Guard reinforcements dispatched by the interim government to quell an uprising that was at once largely expected and disquieting.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said they knew that Ramadan would bring attacks, and that the widely publicized offensive in Fallujah would spark violent provocations in other predominantly Sunni Muslim centers. But the scale of the Mosul attack surprised the U.S. forces in the city. And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.
Iraqi youth climb over several destroyed vehicles in the town of Buhruz, a few kilometers from the city of Baquba in Iraq.
(Ali Yussef - AFP)
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"They were scaring us, and we are from Mosul, so we withdrew to our houses," said Yusuf Rashid, a police officer in a Mosul neighborhood named "Justice."
As fighting winds down in a Fallujah that has been returned by overwhelming force to the sovereignty of the new Iraq, U.S. forces are turning to the many other cities besieged by a fresh wave of insurgent attacks. The resistance remains concentrated in regions dominated by the Sunni Muslim minority, further complicating the interim government's stated desire to include Iraq's entire population in January elections.
On Sunday, U.S. tanks and attack helicopters swooped into Baiji, the midway point between Mosul and Baghdad, where insurgents destroyed a key highway bridge and claimed the city.
Also on Sunday, masked men carried guns aloft in a protest in Baqubah. U.S. forces also engaged fighters in Tall Afar, a largely Turkmen city west of Mosul, and in Hawija, northwest of Baghdad. Insurgents attacked several police stations in the city, demolishing a portion of one with a bomb, the military said. Four Iraqi National Guardsmen were wounded and two were kidnapped, the military said. Another police station was "destroyed and abandoned" in the town of Uwaynat, also in the north, the military said.
Bands of armed men moved freely at night in several neighborhoods of Baghdad, where the number of attacks on U.S. forces has more than doubled from a week ago. Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, remains a rebel stronghold.
And U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight in Samarra, the city advertised as a model for the assault on Fallujah when 1st Infantry Division tanks rolled in there six weeks ago to reclaim the city from insurgents. Under the curfew again in effect there, Samarra residents are allowed on the street for only four hours each morning, and over the weekend its latest police chief, installed just last month, quit.
"We never believed a fight in Fallujah would mean an end to the insurgency," a U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad said. "We've never defined success that way.
"We still have the very difficult problem of a Sunni insurgency."
Just how much the move on Fallujah is roiling the rest of Iraq is a matter still being assessed by Iraqi and U.S. officials. They appear heartened that the country's Shiite majority remains quiescent and largely animated by the prospect of asserting power through the ballot. That marks the sharpest contrast with the April uprising, when militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr took control of cities across the country's south, opening a vast new military front just as Marines assaulted Fallujah the first time.
Sadr's defeat in August by a U.S. offensive in the holy city of Najaf, followed by weeks of grinding assault in the Baghdad slum named for his father, did much to persuade the radical cleric to shift his energies to politics. For Iraqi and U.S. decision-makers, it also reinforced the strategy of confronting the Sunni insurgency in its own strongholds.
But if the tactical battle was won in Fallujah -- removing both a symbol of successful resistance and a genuine paramilitary base -- it remains far from clear who will prevail in the larger strategic fight to make the interim government credible to a Sunni population embittered by the loss of influence it enjoyed under the government of former president Saddam Hussein.
The attacks in Mosul did not signal imminent success, at least not to its residents.
