MOSUL: US military engineers are defying nightly attacks in a race to build forts in devastated districts of downtown Mosul ahead of what has been billed as the next key battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

As night fell over the war-torn city on Saturday a huge convoy of dump trucks escorted by American tanks and armoured personnel carriers flowed out from Mosul’s main US base towards one of the city’s most violent districts.

The cavalry troopers protecting the delivery had been briefed to expect to be ambushed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and insurgents were reported to be prowling the city in a car rigged with explosives.

“Aie-yee-ah, all right, get some!” shouted the turret gunner in convoy leader Captain William Nance’s armoured Humvee jeep as he test fired his M240 machinegun at the edge of the base. “Tonight could be the night.” Dogs barked but by 7 pm the streets of west Mosul, one of Al Qaeda’s remaining urban bastions in Iraq, were empty of people as the convoy rolled past the twisted ruins of smashed concrete houses and shop fronts.

“Hey guys, I need the chatter kept to an absolute minimum, OK?” Nance warned his crew as radio reports came in of trouble in the city.

Last month, following two explosions that claimed dozens of Iraqi lives, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered his commanders to launch a “decisive battle” against the Al Qaeda extremists holed up in Mosul.

But for all the firepower the Americans and their Iraqi allies can now bring to bear on the streets of the northern city, they are not yet in a position to deal a swift, final blow against their elusive foe.

“Is it going to be a large-scale clearing operation like you saw in Sadr City in 2004-2005 or in Fallujah? No,” said Major Thomas Feltey, executive officer of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, based in Mosul.

“It’s going to be nothing like that,” he explained, pointing instead to a policy of sustained pressure, adding that in the unit’s first 100 days in the city it has seen reported attacks drop by a third.

In Mosul, US and Iraqi forces have not yet been able to score the kind of dramatic victories over Al Qaeda that they have in the capital Baghdad and in the cities and deserts of western Iraq.

Farther south, reinforced by five US combat brigades shipped in as part of General David Petraeus’s famous “surge” strategy, troops have been able to set up dozens of fortified outposts in flashpoint city districts.

More importantly, bloody Al Qaeda attacks on civilian targets and tribal leaders convinced many once hostile Iraqi communities to rally to the Americans and denounce the extremists in their midst.

There have been fewer civilian deaths here and the populace remains “on the fence,” in Feltey’s phrase, undecided whether to back the government or the insurgents or to stay out of the fight.

In order to take on the enemy, the 3rd Armoured Cavalry and their Iraqi allies are now beginning to build the small fortified patrol bases that have proved effective in Baghdad elsewhere.

Al Qaeda has learned from the setbacks it suffered in the capital that once a US or Iraqi unit is safely installed in a city it is tough to dislodge. The group has launched a determined bid to stop the building.

So on Saturday night the troops took no chances as they unloaded concrete crash barriers and 1,500 cubic metres of earth to fill the huge wire baskets used as blast walls at a traffic roundabout in southwest Mosul.

“The reason this circle is important... is that this has been a major source of IED (roadside bomb) activity,” Nance said at the site. “Just about every unit in western Mosul has been blown up here at least once.” Working by bright moonlight and the occasional beams of headlights from earth-moving vehicles, military engineers unloaded the first trucks while troops backed by 60-tonne Abrams tanks secured the immediate perimeter.—AFP