is the Boston Globe's Thanassis Cambanis. The stuff he's filing offers a far more detailed picture than the cobbled-together reports out of Baghdad. Here's a bit from his latest piece:
Real power on Iraq's streets often lies in the hands of men like Sadi Ahmed Pire.
Iraqi police fled in the face of the insurgent offensive in Mosul that began last week, and only a handful of Iraqi Army troops stayed behind when their colleagues went to assist the US-led attack on Fallujah.
That's where Pire and his fighting force came in.
In name, Pire is a politician, head of the Mosul bureau of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. In theory, the Kurdish peshmerga militia has been fully absorbed into the Iraqi National Guard.
In practice, however, in a society whose increasingly inadequate national institutions are dissolving under the pressure of a sustained insurgency, the Kurdish political parties and their peshmerga fighters have maintained tight discipline -- as well as loyalty to the American presence.
That makes Pire and his soldiers in Mosul an undeniable fact on the ground, part of the patchwork of locally powerful groups across Iraq that exercises control and provides security.
It is not the police or the governor appointed by Baghdad who really runs Mosul, but rather, a constellation of groups -- insurgents and Arab nationalists on the west bank of the Tigris River, Kurdish political parties and militia on the east bank, and Turkomen in pockets throughout the city.
Another obvious bonus of Cambanis' work is that he's no sissy he-said she-said scribe. In fact, he appears to be willing to push the envelope and make strong assesments in his own voice. Nice to see. Anyway, take a look for yourself.
