We will not surrender

John Laughland reports from Iraq on the determination of ordinary people to fight any attempt by the British and Americans to impose regime change

Mosul, northern Iraq

The ancient city of Mosul straddles the Tigris near the Turkish and Syrian borders, and just beneath the hills of Kurdistan. Churches and mosques jostle for space in its tiny biblical alleyways; Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Syrians, Turkmen, Jews and Yezidis all call it home. St Thomas the Apostle stopped here on the way to India; Agatha Christie lived here and was inspired to write Murder in Mesopotamia and They Came to Baghdad. And here is the Assyrian city of Nineveh, where the 6th-century bc King Ashurbanipal reigned in glory -25,000 clay tablets from his great library were carted off to the British Museum by Sir Henry Layard in 1853 – and whose destruction the Old Testament prophet Nahum gleefully predicted: ‘There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off. For upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?’

It often seems as if Nahum has been reincarnated as a speechwriter in the US State Department, so succinctly do such sentiments encapsulate current American and British policy towards Iraq. For Mosul lies just inside the no-fly zone proclaimed by Washington and London after the Gulf war, but just outside the territory captured by the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions after the war. In one of the greatest unreported small wars in history, more than 40,000 sorties have been flown over Iraq since 1998. In Mosul itself, as in the southern no-fly zone, bombing raids are so regular that Iraqis react with insurmountable ennui when you ask them for some figures. ‘It’s in the papers every single day,’ they reply – which is not much help if you are a bit behind in your cuttings from the Baghdad Bugle.