By Missy Ryan MOSUL, Iraq, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Five years of war have reduced much of Mosul to rubble, and U.S. and Iraqi authorities are pledging to deliver on long-time promises to rebuild as they launch a new campaign to rout a stubborn insurgency. Mistrust runs deep among residents of this ethnically and religiously diverse city, which U.S. forces see as one of their last battlegrounds against al Qaeda militants as violence drops sharply across most of Iraq. Near a giant U.S. military base, American humvees rumble down "Baghdad Highway". The thoroughfare is lined by buildings flattened into heaps of cinderblock or pockmarked by mortar blasts and bullets. Sewage runs freely and cows graze around mounds of litter. Shops keep their metal gates shut tight, and people stay indoors. At dusk the air is thick with burning trash. The Iraqi government, alongside the United States, is promising to succeed where past reconstruction efforts failed in the city, fraught with simmering tension between an Arab majority and politically powerful Kurdish minority. Last week Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sent one of his deputies, Rafie al-Esawi, to Mosul to discuss reconstruction plans with local officials. He has named his communications minister, a Mosul native, to take charge of the work. "When anyone arrives in Mosul today, he would think it is a battleground," said the minister, Farouq Abdul-Qadir, ticking off a list of problems: an ancient sewage system, a woefully inadequate power supply, high unemployment, and a slowing but still grim drumbeat of assassinations and bomb attacks. "In the past, the problem for reconstruction was security, and the same problem exists now. We still don't have full security in Mosul," he said. "ABJECT FAILURE" Since 2003, the United States has spent millions of dollars in Mosul to improve electricity, overhaul army facilities, rehabilitate schools and on other works. U.S. soldiers and a State Department-led provincial reconstruction team are at work in Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province, providing humanitarian aid, equipping hospitals, and supporting a farm sector blighted by years of drought. The Iraqi government has backed its own array of projects but officials acknowledge Mosul's needs remain vast. "No security plan can achieve success without providing for the people's basic needs," said Mosul Mayor Zuhair Muhsin al-Aaraji. He and other officials feel Mosul has been neglected, saying Baghdad has moved too slowly to provide funds. U.S. Brigadier General Tony Thomas, commander of U.S. forces in Mosul, said a recent Iraqi initiative to follow military operations with millions of dollars' worth of reconstruction had been an "abject failure". "People thought, 'Here it comes. We're going to turn the corner. We've got reconstruction flowing in right on top of security," he said adding that reconstruction money was spent "in all the wrong places". As an example, instead of major road repairs, U.S. officials say, Mosul got new curbstones. On Oct. 15, Iraqi and U.S. forces began their third major military operation in Mosul since May. They will go house to house in search of insurgents and weapons caches. They have also formed a new committee to oversee future reconstruction projects in the city and pledge greater coordination that will help avoid a repeat of past problems. Across the province, there are plans in the next few months to haul away rubble, buy garbage bins, hire more than 2,000 schoolteachers, help farmers buy wheat and barley seed and bolster hospitals' blood and trauma supplies. In the long run, the sewage system is to be be rebuilt, a thermal power plant is to be completed and highways expanded. VIOLENCE AND DECAY Rebuilding a city still marred by violence is not easy. Earlier this year, U.S. soldiers visited a school in western Mosul they were planning to renovate. Soon afterwards, the headmaster received a call warning him to send the children home early. A car bomb flattened the school that afternoon. "People don't just forget about that overnight," said Master Sergeant Kevin Rowe, who works on U.S. rebuilding efforts. Many Mosul residents, who have heard promises of reconstruction and prosperity before, will remain wary. On a market street in the al-Sukar neighbourhood, business is recovering and people welcome the drop in violence. They are, however, still waiting for basic services. "We haven't had proper electricity for 10 or 12 years," said Amer, a shopkeeper. "The government is in charge of sewage, but it's not 100 percent. It's at 50 percent, maybe 25 percent." Riyadh Mohammed, a retired teacher leaning against the gate of his home, prayer beads in hand, gives little credence to renewed promises of better things to come in Mosul. "All the government does is take our money," he said. (Additional reporting by Khalid al-Ansary in Baghdad; editing by Andrew Roche)
Demonstrators march during a protest in Basra, 420 km (260 miles) southeast of Baghdad, October 25, 2008. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Basra to protest a pact that ...
