Insurgent Eggs Don't Stay in One Basket

This will likely come as no surprise to anyone who owns a television or a computer, or even subscribes to a newspaper, but the insurgent problem in Iraq has not changed noticeably with the fall of Fallujah - it simply shifted positions.

The fighting started in Mosul two days after U.S. tanks entered Fallujah. Armed men appeared in a sudden tide on a main street in Iraq's third-largest city, a wide avenue where so many American convoys had been ambushed that locals nicknamed it "Death Street."

At 11 a.m. Thursday, the target was an armored SUV. Witnesses said that after its Western passengers were chased into a police station, the driver was burned alive atop the vehicle as the attackers shouted "Jew!" The city of 1.8 million people then devolved into chaos. Thousands of police officers abandoned their precinct houses. The governor's house was set alight. Insurgents took the police chief's brother, himself a senior officer, into his front yard and shot him dead.

Obviously, Mosul was a chief area of concern. I try to keep up with any posts from A Star in Mosul each day, because the teenage girl who runs it provides a gritty look at the reality of life inside that city. (She has a new post up this morning, by the way.)

The wapo article linked above goes on to give a bit more realistic analysis of the insurgent shift.

"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."

That's putting it a bit mildly, to say the least.