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For GI's, Iraqi city emerges as test case

Jun-16-2005 » Filed Under: TF Freedom

By Richard A. Oppel Jr. The New York Times
Link to Full Article

TAL AFAR, Iraq Nine months ago the U.S. 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 huge region. With so few soldiers 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 weapons and 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.[...]

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 metal roll-down gates.

In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now schools her six children at home after a flyer 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, Mohammed Ameen, will not let his children play outside. "Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.

Tribes sympathetic to the new 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 taken our people to the hospital."[...]


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