Battle Reveals Ethnic Muddle in Iraq
by SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
TAL AFAR, Iraq - After Najaf and Fallujah, suddenly it has been Tal Afar's turn to follow the familiar pattern: militants move in, U.S. forces fight to drive them out and local leaders get caught in the middle trying to broker peace.
The battle for this northern Iraqi city has highlighted the tangle of ethnicities that the U.S.-led coalition has to deal with and the fragility of its control over the country.
From Shiite strongholds in Basra, Nasiriyah, Kut and Najaf through the so-called "Sunni Triangle" of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, coalition forces for 17 months have been waging battles against insurgents with varying degrees of success, rarely registering any big, clear-cut victories.
Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, posed a different challenge.
The city of 250,000 is an ethnic stew of Turks intermarried with Arabs, re-embracing their Turkish roots after years of submission to Saddam Hussein's efforts to "Arabize" the country. Then there are the Kurds next door, who claim Tal Afar as part of their enclave.
There's also another big and important neighbor in the picture - Turkey, a U.S. ally which is deeply suspicious of the Kurds and supportive of the ethnic Turks of Tal Afar.
Moreover, the Americans said - and townspeople confirm - that foreign fighters had moved in, though it is hard to know who they were. Duraid Kashmoula, governor of surrounding Nineveh province, likens Iraq's insurgency to "a pack of cards whose colors keep changing."
American troops and Iraqi forces laid siege to Tal Afar in early September after it fell under insurgent control, and most of its inhabitants fled. On Sept. 12, they attacked with warplanes, helicopters and tanks.
The blockade was lifted Tuesday. Although Kashmoula believes the truce will hold, people returning to Tal Afar are not as confident. They fear that, like Fallujah and Najaf, they face a protracted war between the U.S. Army and militants.
Violence continues almost daily in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, even though U.S. forces have struck several deals with local leaders to end the conflict. In the holy city of Najaf, two months of violent insurgency by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia ended with a series of truces, flared anew on Aug. 5 and was halted with a peace agreement leaving the Shiite cleric's forces intact.
Last week, U.S. troops entered Samarra for the first time since May 30 after cutting a deal with local officials to reopen the city in return for an end to attacks on Americans.
In southern Iraq, British and other coalition forces have faced bloody disturbances fomented by al-Sadr's militia, and Baghdad suffers almost daily street fighting, car bombings and kidnappings.
Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, spokesman for the Army's Task Force Olympia in charge of northern Iraq, said that over a two-month period, cells made up of religious extremists, foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists in Tal Afar "basically took control of the city."
It reached a point, he said, where "we couldn't drive down the road without getting attacked... It was a daily occurrence."
He said the foreign fighters made their way up Tal Afar from Fallujah or across the Syrian border.
"The governor of the Nineveh province basically said, 'Hey, listen. It's out of control. We need to do something,'" Hastings said.
A senior U.S. government official in Iraq said on condition of anonymity that after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam, many of his Baath Party loyalists fled with money to Syria, where they set up a Baathist base.
The first major Iraqi town near the Syrian border is Tal Afar, which he said they used as a launching pad for operations around Iraq. They also got help from the local population, many of whom are unemployed, doing such tasks as planting roadside bombs or acting as "spotters," he said.
The official said "a very, very small number" of the insurgents in Tal Afar - or even other parts of Iraq - are foreign fighters linked to al-Qaida or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though the Iraqi insurgents most likely work with them.
He said the security situation in Iraq would not be very different even if the foreign fighters were not present here.
But the governor, Kashmoula, and tribal leaders in Tal Afar denied asking the Americans to intervene. On the contrary, Kashmoula said, they urged them to stay away. They did - until they were attacked Sept. 4.
"The Americans wanted to get involved even before we discussed it. They were getting hit every day," the governor said.
Abdul-Mahdi Ali Khan al-Husseini, a Tal Afar tribal chief, said militants had been operating in Tal Afar for a year and had killed 30 people who worked for the Americans as translators, cooks or carpenters. After Sept. 4, with masked gunmen appearing for the first time on main streets, U.S. commanders met with local leaders and promised not to move in if the militants could be persuaded to disarm, according to al-Husseini and other officials at the talks.
"We had no idea who the resistance was. They were all masked. So we sent people to talk to them on the streets, urged them to leave the streets for the sake of the people," al-Husseini said.
Most of the gunmen had disappeared by Sept. 8, but the Americans attacked anyway, he said.
Hastings said the Army killed at least 67 militants in the Tal Afar offensive and detained 48 people during the two days after the assault.
Al-Husseini said most of the insurgent leaders killed were Islamic militants from Tal Afar.
Turkey's intervention also played a role. Tal Afar's ethnic Turks claimed Kurdish fighters were fighting alongside the coalition. American and Kurdish officials both denied it, but Ankara threatened to stop cooperating with the Americans, and the next day the siege was lifted.
First the guv'ner said, then the Turks said..
BTW, The Turkmen are just plain Turks, contrary to the belief of the author.. They were given that name by the Brits who occupied the area as described in the main article.