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The battle to control the streets of Tal Afar IRAQ: PURGING THE INSURGENTS Near Iraq's northern border lies a city which has become a blueprint for the Allies to win the support of locals and weaken insurgents' power, but it remains a city at war(The Sunday Herald Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)I HEARD a story while in Tal Afar. A terrible story, told to me by a senior US Army officer. It was about a 14-year-old Iraqi boy who had been kidnapped from his family and pressganged into service by a cell of Islamic insurgents operating in one of the city's Sunni neighbourhoods. During questioning by the Americans after his capture, the boy told how he had been sodomised and abused by the insurgents, before being given the job of holding down the legs of victims they beheaded. Throughout the traumatic period of his detention by some of the most barbaric fighters in Iraq, the only reassurance the boy was ever given was that of promotion; that he himself would one day become an executioner and beheader. It's a shocking account, but then, in August and September of last year, Tal Afar was a place of scarcely believable brutality. This town of some 200,000 people, barely 40 miles from the Syrian border, had become "like something from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome", according to another senior coalition military spokesman in Baghdad. In some Tal Afar neighbourhoods, such as Sarai, the entire infrastructure was in the grip of insurgents and jihadists, who ran everything from water and electricity supplies, to arms smuggling and propaganda campaigns, all enforced by a regime of kidnappings, shootings and beheadings. Many of the insurgents within this anarchic hotbed of bombers and gunmen were foreign Islamist fighters, who had been ferried clandestinely along the labyrinth of mountain and desert smuggling routes that runs to Tal Afar and Mosul from the Syrian frontier. Inside Tal Afar itself, the city's police force had disintegrated; its last remnants besieged mediaeval-style in an old Ottoman fortress at the heart of the city, too terrified to venture out on to the streets. "All day they shot at us and fired rocket-propelled grenades, " recalls Hasanen Khidir a 26-year-old policeman and Shia Muslim who was one of some 200 officers holed up in the ancient bastion. "When we went out from the castle they ambushed and kidnapped our men, some had their heads cut off." One of the murdered policemen was Khidir's uncle, who was kidnapped while en-route to the larger neighbouring city of Mosul. It was over a month before Khidir heard that his uncle had been killed, shot at point-blank range in the back of the skull. Asked if he himself ever thought of fleeing during those dangerous months, Khidir was adamant. "Why should I run away? We consider this our home, and it would have been no better anywhere else, " he replied. On a variety of Islamic web sites, the invincibility and exploits of the "Lions of Tal Afar", as the insurgents had been dubbed, were endorsed with claims that they would never be overwhelmed. By now, the city was completely out of control and so dangerous that US troops could only move around in 30-tonne Bradley fighting vehicles and tanks. Washington was impatient. Something had to be done to break the insurgents hold on the city, which has a volatile mix of 90-per cent Sunni and 10-per cent Shia Turkmen. What followed was to become the largest military operation of 2005 in Iraq. Tal Afar became the testing ground for a new blueprint strategy aimed at "clearing, holding and building, " in areas that would be purged of insurgents and then rejuvenated to win support from local people, before being handed over to the Iraqi security forces. "Your principal focus has to be to secure the civilian population, the enemy's strategy through fear and intimidation has been the opposite, " explained Colonel H R McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, which was given the task of launching Operation Restoring Rights in Tal Afar in the August of last year. Described by one high-ranking British military official in Baghdad as a "warrior poet" and nicknamed "The Beast" by some of his men, McMaster has developed something of a reputation and is tipped by many as a future high-flier in the US military. An expert on counter-insurgency and author of a book on the Vietnam war, McMaster says that one of the most important things his officers can do is to listen to the local people. "The enemy is very good at disinformation and propaganda, especially here in Tal Afar where there is a high level of illiteracy, " admits McMaster. "Of the people we capture, 90-per cent have very little education and are very susceptible to what is virtually brainwashing." As Operation Restoring Rights, got under way, the 3500 US troops and 5000 Iraqi soldiers in Tal Afar faced tough resistance. US Major Christopher Kennedy recalls how the local hospital was constantly under attack and mosque speakers were used to call out jihadist messages against the coalition. "Taxis were pulling up and drivers handing out rocket-propelled grenade launchers to insurgents, it was as if we had stirred up a hornets' nest." While the aim of the operation might have been to restore rights to the local population, the tactics used by the coalition forces were uncompromising. The troublesome Sarai district where the hardest core of the insurgents were dug in, was effectively "wired in" with triple-strength razor wire strung around the area before a house-to-house sweep. As the operation took hold, tunnels were discovered running between buildings and arms caches dug up from wadis. Outside Tal Afar itself, deep into the surrounding district, operations were extended to so-called "way stations", remote desert motels and farms along the border with Syria, which had become safe houses for insurgents. Denying the enemy access to the towns of Rabiah, Sinjar, and Bi'aj - sitting astride Syrian border crossing points - was crucial to securing Tal Afar. TODAY, a covert part of that operation is said to still be ongoing, involving a composite American Special Forces team, known as an SMU (Special Mission Unit). Under stringent cover, these units are said to have begun targeting suspected insurgents and their supporters across the border inside Syria itself. Back in August, as the assault on Tal Afar city got under way proper, some of the heaviest fighting occurred between September 2 and 6. As US tanks, supported by Iraqi infantry, penetrated the insurgent defences in the town, it became clear that certain buildings in the western neighbourhoods had been rigged with booby traps intended to kill coalition troops. One building contained barrels of chemicals that were rigged to explode. Despite the tenacious resistance, the insurgents took heavy losses, 118 dead and 137 captured, before finally being driven out of the city. McMaster says the most significant result of the operations was the breaking of the powerful alliance that had formed between Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters. "For Zarqawi this was not just a huge physical defeat, but a huge psychological one, " claims McMaster. Great importance was also placed on the role Iraqi forces played in the operation, with even President Bush himself claiming that Iraqi security forces "primarily led" the assault on the city. Bush highlighted it as an "especially clear" sign of the progress that Iraqi security forces were making in their own country, comparing the Tal Afar campaign with that of Fallujah, where the attack was led by US forces. In effect, it was viable proof of what had been called the "ink spot" strategy, whereby one area of control would spread to another - like an ink spot spreading on blotting paper - until the entire country was covered, in a model similar to that adopted by the British in Malaya. Not everyone, however, was so convinced. One journalist, Michael Ware of Time magazine, who was embedded with US forces during the battle, says that Bush was wrong in his depiction. Ware insists he saw US Special Forces Green Berets leading Iraqi forces in the initial assault. More worrying are claims by one US Army officer, who took part in the Tal Afar operation, that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a security ring around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of whom were Shi'ites, who were "rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shi'ite said to them." The officer is on the record as saying, "they were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shi'ites", with the active participation of a militia unit led by a former US Special Forces soldier. The implication, should such an account be accurate, is clear; that US forces were complicit in sectarian violence and killing. Whatever is said of the methods and motives behind Operation Restoring Rights, the streets of Tal Afar today, while still tense and at times even explosive, are a far safer place than they were a few months ago. While the insurgency may have been weakened, sectarian resentment continues to simmer, highlighting the ever-present threat of a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that could follow any precipitous US British withdrawal. "Many policemen here in Tal Afar are Shia, they hate us, and sometimes kill us, " one Sunni Turkmen told me a few weeks ago during parliamentary elections while he waited for more than four hours to cast his vote at the al-Zahawi school polling station. "We need to change the make-up of the government in Baghdad to prevent the Shia and Kurds doing what they like, " he warned. Another Sunni voter also expressed his concern over the ever-present dangers of sectarian meltdown in the wake of elections in which unprecedented numbers of Sunnis turned out across Iraq. "It doesn't matter who is the president as long as he doesn't take one sectarian side over the other. "We see discrimination between Shia and Sunni everywhere around this country, and that is the biggest danger for the future after the insurgency and US withdrawal, " warned Abdullah Daoud Mustapha, a janitor at the al-Zahawi school in Tal Afar. For now, the story of the battle for control of Tal Afar's streets as well as its hearts and minds continues to be seen by Washington and the US military as the way ahead. This, combined with strengthening the role of the Iraqi police force and ensuring a balance of Shia and Sunni participation at both political and paramilitary level, is seen as the biggest challenge in the year ahead. "The specific dynamics of every area in Iraq are different, but what we tried to do here in Tal Afar was learn as much as possible about the area and its people to fully understand the impact of our strategy, " points out McMaster. "At the end of the day, the real battleground in Tal Afar, like any other insurgency stronghold across Iraq, is one of intelligence and perception." |