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.
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