Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country’s northern capital into a ghost town.
On Tuesday, the Iraqi Cabinet expressed extreme displeasure over the incursion of Turkish troops into the Kurdish northern region of Iraq and called for a halt to Turkish interference, which Cabinet officials called a “violation of Iraqi sovereignty.” Also on Tuesday, an apparent suicide attack on a bus headed toward Syria from Mosul in northern Iraq killed nine people, according to The New York Times.
Eight Iraqi soldiers were killed and six wounded on Friday, Iraqi officials reported, after an American helicopter mistook them for an al-Qaida cell and opened fire. The U.S. military, which says only five were killed, expressed its “deepest sympathies” for the friendly-fire deaths.