The Battle For Mosul IV

Soldiers, Spies, and Sheep

"They fled. It was all over the news. When the bullets flew, they fled. Leaving stations, abandoning posts, forgetting duties, hundreds of police fled. When the police response to gunfire was to simply run away, the city fell into lawlessness. Pundits rushed to the airwaves, proclaiming the city’s future hopeless. When the news of Hurricane Katrina first reached Mosul, the parallels were uncanny.

When Katrina battered the bayous of New Orleans, she submerged most of the Big Easy, leaving her defenseless. The levees broke and the looters and lowlifes who the Governor had euphemistically called “hoodlums” began ransacking the city. Their gunfire, combined with the prospect of patrolling streets awash in waist-high fetid water, repelled hundreds of police officers from their posts. Many police were unable or unwilling to slog into stations that were under water and out of electricity. Others simply deserted. While many police stood their ground, undoubtedly performing countless acts of heroism that will never be known, the cops who fled got the most attention. Watching the storm and its aftermath from Mosul, especially seeing the wash of relief on the faces of people as the US Army rolled in to restore order, I recalled a time when Mosul, like New Orleans, needed “a few good men.”"
Michael Yon

Long but well worth reading.