MOSUL, Iraq (AFP) — An extra 3,000 police are to boost forces in Iraq's northern Nineveh province where troops are readying for a new assault on Al-Qaeda after lethal bombings in Mosul city, an official said on Saturday.
Of these, 1,000 will form a new rapid response unit bearing the name of Nineveh provincial police chief Brigadier General Salah al-Juburi, who was killed with two other officers by a suicide bomber in Mosul on Thursday.
The attacker struck when Juburi went to inspect the carnage from a massive bombing the previous day that obliterated a building and flattened houses in west Mosul, killing 35 people and wounding 217.
Brigadier General Wathiq al-Hamdani, who has been appointed acting Nineveh police chief in Juburi's place, said another 2,000 police would also be recruited, with preference being given to family members of those killed in Wednesday's building blast.
"The interior minister, Jawad Bolani, ordered the appointment of an additional 3,000 policemen to Nineveh province to support the police there," Hamdani told AFP.
The Mosul attacks have been blamed on Al-Qaeda, which the US says is responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Friday declared "final war" on the jihadists in the wake of the bombings in Mosul.
Iraqi forces, he told a conference in the central shrine city of Karbala, were moving towards Mosul 370 kilometres (225 miles) north of Baghdad, for a major assault that would become a "decisive battle."
"We have formed an operations centre in Nineveh (province) for a final war against Al-Qaeda and the remnants of the former (Saddam Hussein) regime," Maliki said.
"Today our forces are moving towards Mosul. What we have planned in Nineveh will be final. It will be a decisive battle," he said.
US intelligence experts warn that ethnically divided Mosul remains a dangerous "strategic centre of gravity for Al-Qaeda" because of its road links with the Syrian border, which most foreign fighters coming into Iraq use as their springboard.
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