What Happens After Mosul Is Liberated?

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent: If you want to know what will happen to Mosul after Isis is pushed out, look back to the fall of Saddam Hussein

The anti-Isis forces involved in seizing Mosul may be temporary allies, but they are also longstanding rivals.

I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag.

If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders.

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Update: 'Unsavory Mix': Liberating of Mosul Will Not Bring Iraq's Troubles to an End (Sputnik)

WNU Editor: Bottom line .... it appears that nothing will change after the Islamic State have been driven out of Mosul. But if this happens .... there is a very good chance that it may get worse .... Iraqi Kurds will push for independence after Mosul is freed — PM (RT).