Thread: Magnet For Iraq Insurgents Is A Crucial Test Of New U.S. Strategy

New York Times
June 16, 2005
Pg. 1

Magnet For Iraq Insurgents Is A Crucial Test Of New U.S. Strategy

By Richard A. Oppel Jr.

TAL AFAR, Iraq, June 15 - Nine months ago the American military laid siege to this city in northwestern Iraq and proclaimed it freed from the grip of insurgents. Last month, the Americans returned in force - to reclaim it once again.

After the battle here in September the military left behind fewer than 500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from nearby Syria - and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school.

It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest.

"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. "But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we've cleared the insurgents out."

While officials in Washington say the military has all the troops it needs, on-the-ground battle commanders in the most violent parts of Iraq - in cities like Ramadi, Mosul and Mahmudiya - have said privately that they need more manpower to pacify their areas and keep them that way.

Now, with the pace of insurgent attacks rising across Iraq and scores being killed daily in bombings and mass executions, Tal Afar and the surrounding area is becoming something of a test case for a strategy to try to break the cycle: using battle-hardened American forces working in conjunction with tribal leaders to clear out the insurgents and then leaving behind Iraqi forces to try to keep the peace.

Many tribal sheiks here say they favor an all-out assault to rout the city's insurgents, but American commanders say a major attack like the one that leveled Falluja last November is to be avoided almost at all costs. The bloodshed, destruction of property and alienation of the Iraqi public is too high a price to pay, they say.

A political solution is best, the Americans said, but fiendishly difficult, given the tangle of insurgent pressures and tribal loyalties and divisions.

"If you take all the complexities of Iraq and compressed it into one city, it is Tal Afar," said the regiment's commander, Col. H. R. McMaster.

The military's decision to reassign the regiment from the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad to the region around Tal Afar was an implicit acknowledgement that it had lost control of the area. The first troops began arriving in April, and nearly 4,000 were in place by mid-May.

A Place Frozen in Fear

On arrival here, commanders found a town that was, for all practical purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in their thrall. "Anyone not helping the terrorists can't leave their homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand money or weapons or make them join them to kill people," said Hikmat Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar's 82 tribes, who said most of the city is controlled by insurgents. "If they refuse they will chop their heads off."

Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes Tal Afar, concurred. "There is no life in Tal Afar," he said in an interview a week ago. "It is like Mosul a few months ago - a ghost town." There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and they project a level of fear and intimidation across the city far in excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.

In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now home-schools her six children, after a flier posted at their school warned: "If you love your children, you won't send them to school here because we will kill them." A neighbor, Muhammad Ameen, will not let his kids play outside. "Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.

Tribes sympathetic to the new Iraqi government have suffered constant assaults at the hands of insurgents and rival tribes. More than 500 mortars have struck lands belonging to the Al-Sada al-Mousawiyah tribe since September, said the tribe's leader, Sheik Sayed Abdullah Sayed Wahab. "All of my tribe are prisoners in their own homes," he says. "We can't even take our people to the hospital."

At least 40 members of two predominantly Shiite tribes of Turkomen, the Sada and Jolak, were killed in two car bombings in May. The perpetrators are believed by American officers to be members of the predominantly Sunni Arab Qarabash tribe, which they say has strong ties to Syrian fighters and links to the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq. "I need someone to hear my cries for help because we are in a bad situation," said Sheik Wali al-Jolak in an interview at his compound in southwest Tal Afar, only a few blocks from the Qarabash neighborhood. He lost 28 tribe members in the two attacks.

The Tal Afar police force disintegrated last fall, and the few who remain stay in an ancient hilltop castle, afraid to venture out. Commanders here caution troops to assume that anyone on the street dressed as a policeman is an impostor. Insurgents wearing police uniforms shoot at American helicopters and threaten residents.

Even with the new regiment, the military still lacks troops to completely patrol the outlying desert and grazing lands, where insurgents had taken over remote villages, providing sanctuary a short distance from Mosul, the country's dominant northern city and an active insurgent hub. Insurgents use irrigation canals to elude American forces chasing them in armored vehicles that cannot cross the waterways. Smugglers drive through holes cut in the large berm that guards the Syrian border. Remote cinderblock farmhouses serve as safe havens.

At the Rabia border crossing into Syria, several hundred American soldiers arrived three weeks ago and say they have disrupted the smuggling of weapons and money. But they doubt there has been any curtailment yet in the infiltration of foreign fighters. "As far as foreign fighters coming in from the border control point, I can't say we've had any impact on that," said Capt. Jason Whitten, the company commander at Rabia. Commanders say new technology will be installed at the border crossing shortly to help track travelers and detect false identification materials.

In its first weeks here, the regiment has pressed sweeps deep into desert areas that had not seen a large American presence since the 101st Airborne Division left in early 2004. Instead, many areas had witnessed, at best, only sporadic patrols that had done little to deter insurgents, commanders say. "Resources are everything in combat, and when you don't have enough manpower to move around, you have to pick the places," said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.

Two weeks ago more than 1,000 troops from the new regiment poured into Biaj, a town of 15,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Tal Afar, where insurgents had destroyed the police station, and the mayor and the police fled last fall. Soldiers eventually searched every house in the town, capturing more than a dozen suspected insurgents without a shot being fired.

Biaj faces a severe water shortage and trash and sewage fill the streets. But the markets and neighborhoods teem with children who give passing American patrols waves and a thumbs-up. Indeed, the town appears to show what happens if there are enough troops to pacify an area and police it effectively afterward. But commanders plan to withdraw all but 150 American troops and leave a battalion of about 500 Iraqi soldiers and 200 police officers in Biaj.

Taking Back Tal Afar

In Tal Afar, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, commander of Sabre Squadron, which is equipped with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters, moved quickly to reassert control of strategic sites. Soldiers drove out insurgents who had taken control of the area around the hospital, and turned over security there to Iraqi troops.

Similarly, soldiers cleared the main east-west highway, which had been made impassable by improvised explosive devices. An Iraqi battalion now patrols the route, and Colonel Hickey is spearheading an effort to rebuild the police with recruits drawn from tribes and trained in Jordan.

Insurgents waged heavy assaults against the squadron in the first few weeks after it arrived but suffered heavy losses while having little impact on the American troops. Those attacks have declined while violence against townspeople has increased, Colonel Hickey said. "We've disrupted the terrorists' network," he said. "But what I have to overcome is a population too scared to open their stores or step out on the street."

Tal Afar has little municipal leadership to speak of. American commanders say the mayor, a Sunni Arab, may have ties to the insurgency. The police chief - a Shiite dismissed a few days ago for the second time in as many months - may have been involved in the abuse or torture of suspects, they say.

Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military presence here, some sheiks have become outspoken critics of the insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60 attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here. To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not treat terror suspects roughly enough.

Other sheiks said it was better to pursue a political solution. But sheiks from each point of view accused one another of being unwilling to identify suspected insurgents. American commanders had planned to circulate a list of 1,400 people thought to have potential insurgent connections, seeking verification - or denials - from the sheiks. But they decided against it because few sheiks would openly affirm or deny the status of insurgent suspects in front of other Iraqis, Colonel Hickey said.

Tal Afar's tribes have to bury old grudges for the city to be at peace, says Brig. Gen. Mohsen Doski, a Kurd who commands a brigade of 2,000 Iraqi troops garrisoned here. "If we continue talking about the past or what this certain person did or this tribe did, we will stay in a closed circle," he said. If the city's problems cannot be solved politically, he said, "We have to do in Tal Afar the same as in Falluja."

The American regiment's commander, Colonel McMaster, warned the sheiks at the close of the day-long conference that the insurgents cannot be defeated unless the tribes work together better. "To an outsider, it seems there is not a lot of power because there are divisions. That's exactly what the terrorists want," he said.

In an interview, the colonel said the violence "isn't intertribal" but a mixture of foreign fighters, Zarqawi loyalists and others working "to incite chaos, breed fear and set conditions for them to continue to operate out of Tal Afar." With the regiment now in place, he added, "Tal Afar is clearly contested, where before it wasn't."

An Iraqi Fighting Force?

One week ago Tuesday, 1,000 American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi troops swept into the insurgency's principal safe haven in Tal Afar, the Sariya neighborhood, detaining 34 suspected insurgent leaders and fighters and killing as many as 10 fighters.

Relying on Iraqi troops proved a miserable failure 13 months ago in Falluja, where Iraqis were put in charge only to see the city come rapidly under the sway of a Taliban-style terrorist theocracy that had to be rooted out six months later by the Marines. But American commanders now maintain that in some places, like Haifa Street, a former insurgent stronghold in the heart of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers are improving.

In Tal Afar, commanders say the new Iraqi troops they work with - two predominantly Kurdish battalions and one mainly of Shiites from Basra - have helped immeasurably in identifying insurgents. Capt. Greg Mitchell, a company commander with Sabre Squadron, said his troops could not have apprehended so many suspects on Tuesday had Iraqis not been involved. "They have a much more discerning eye" for clues about suspicious Iraqis, he said.

Yet American troops also remain wary of Iraqis' tendencies to respond to an attack by shooting wildly in all directions - a "death blossom," as the troops here call it. "They keep their fingers on the trigger and they'll just shoot without aiming," Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Horsley warned during the operation Tuesday, as fire rang out.

Last Tuesday, an insurgent gunman wounded an American officer as he walked through an alley accompanied by Iraqi troops. When the shooting started, the Iraqis ran back to the street as the gunman continued to fire at the wounded officer, said Capt. Jesse Sellars, a company commander here. An American sergeant had to cajole a handful of Iraqis to return fire in an effort to rescue the officer, who later died.

"They're new soldiers," Major Wilwerding, of Sabre Squadron, said of the Iraqis who fled. "They're not conditioned yet. They'll get better."