Troops storm empty insurgent haven
Enemies fled upon hearing word of attack -- 'they knew they were being destroyed'
- Jonathan Finer, Washington Post
Sunday, September 11, 2005

Tal Afar, Iraq -- The moment the Iraqi troops launched their attack just after 7 a.m. Saturday, the bullets began to fly. Gunfire echoed off centuries-old stone buildings in the insurgent-controlled neighborhood of Sarai: machine-gun bursts, booming tank rounds and an incessant crackle of AK-47s that lasted for most of an hour.

But the shooting spree was going in only one direction.

"So far, Iraqi army reporting no enemy contact," came the word over the radio, 45 minutes after the first shots were fired, to U.S. troops waiting to join the assault.

By the time the Americans entered Sarai -- in a rare supporting role to an Iraqi battalion comprising mostly the Kurdish peshmerga militiamen, who led the charge -- the labyrinthine warren of close-packed structures and streets too narrow for armored vehicles was eerily deserted.

Insurgents had fled, along with almost every resident, amid widespread word of an imminent offensive and heavy aerial bombardment that had lasted for days. Virtually every building in a 20-block radius was pockmarked with bullet holes, and many bore the trademark gaping holes blown by heavy explosives dropped nightly from the sky. Only a handful of dead bodies was found.

For many of the more than 5,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, Saturday brought only an anti-climax. Their 8-day-old counterinsurgency operation in Tal Afar had built toward an expected showdown with insurgents in the Sarai neighborhood.

"I was very unhappy. I came to capture bad guys and kill them, but we hardly saw any," said Iraqi army Cpl. Salar Omar of Irbil. "One of the men we captured said that many ran to other cities."

Commanders proclaimed the relative lack of resistance a sign of the success of the operation, in which at least 550 suspected insurgents have been killed or captured, the vast majority of them Iraqi. One U.S. soldier and five Iraqi troops also have been killed.

"I think what we saw today was the effect of our counterinsurgency and security operations in Tal Afar in the previous weeks," said Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "The enemy then decided to bail out. They knew they were being destroyed."

The operation in Tal Afar, which U.S. and Iraqi officials have long considered a strategic hub for insurgents carrying out attacks across northern Iraq, will continue into the coming days, commanders here said. The city of more than 200,000 has been plagued by insurgent violence and clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslim tribes. A year ago this month, U.S. forces drove insurgents from the city only to see them return when U.S. troop strength in the region was reduced to about 500 soldiers.

In forgoing a fight, insurgents repeated a tactic they have employed in the face of counterinsurgency offensives in the neighboring province of Anbar, where Marines invading a string of insurgent strongholds met little resistance from fighters who moved elsewhere or hid among the civilian population.

In Baghdad on Saturday, three Iraqi Cabinet officials held a news conference to discuss the unfolding events. Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi said other cities could soon see offensives like the one in Tal Afar.

"We tell our people everywhere -- in Qaim, Rawah, Samarra and Ramadi -- that we are coming and there will be no hideout or place for the terrorists," he said.

In recent days, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers operating throughout the city had converged on Sarai, where fighting was expected to be fiercest. One U.S. squadron of just more than 1,000 soldiers had planned for roughly 10 casualties per day during the assault. The night before the attack, commanders pored over aerial photographs of the neighborhood, which is so densely constructed that buildings were all but indistinguishable, making it difficult to plot a route for the attack.

"It's pretty much the worst urban terrain for fighting imaginable," Capt. Alan Blackburn said as he peppered his platoon commanders with questions about how to deal with wounded soldiers or large numbers of dead civilians.

Blackburn's intelligence showed that from 75 to 100 insurgents remained in Sarai, along with as many as 500 civilians, despite frequent messages broadcast over U.S. military loudspeakers calling on residents to evacuate.

Soldiers were awakened at 1:30 a.m. by a huge explosion from a ground-fired rocket, one of nine fired on the neighborhood during the operation, along with 20 Hellfire missiles, 20 2.75-inch rockets from AH-64 Apache helicopters, and 22 105mm rounds from AC-130 Specter gunships. Tanks also regularly fired rounds into the neighborhood

"Imagine being down there when you hear those things coming in," said Pfc. Patrick Hewitt of Frederick, Md., watching smoke billow from Sarai. "You must just be like, 'Oh, my god, not again.' "

At 5 a.m., U.S. soldiers gathered at a bullet-riddled high school on the edge of Sarai and waited for the attack to begin. Three hours later, with the Iraqi army barrage still under way, Capt. Noah Hanners marched his platoon in to begin searching buildings for insurgents or evidence of their activity.

The soldiers walked along a wide avenue into what could have passed for a Hollywood version of a war zone: buildings missing roofs destroyed by explosions; blackened vehicles, some still smoking; shattered glass littering the road. They stepped over shell casings of all shapes and sizes.

It was impossible to determine how much of the destruction was recent and how much had been left unrepaired for months, or years.

The soldiers gathered material they considered suspicious, labeled it with permanent markers and placed it into garbage bags: in one house, military handbooks with diagrams showing how to conduct ambushes and make explosives; in another, three Molotov cocktails; in a mosque, grenades in a side room.

But each of the roughly 20 homes that Hanners' platoon searched had been abandoned.

"That we had so little resistance shows the operation has been effective," Hanners said. "In that area, you normally wouldn't have lasted five minutes without getting shot up."

Ellie