Da The New York Times del 12/09/2005
Originale su http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/international/middleeast/12iraq.html

Under Pressure, Rebels Abandon an Iraqi Stronghold

di Richard A. Oppel Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 11 - Fighting in the northern insurgent stronghold of Tal Afar calmed Sunday, as thousands of American and Iraqi troops who entered the city this weekend found that many insurgents had fled and that its most dangerous neighborhood was largely deserted, Iraqi and American military officials said.

"There are those who fled the city," said Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi, adding that the insurgents who escaped would be hunted down. "Some of them have the ability to move. They will not find safe haven in Iraq."

Thousands of frightened families fled Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city, as the American-led assault neared and are now in camps or shelters around the city and Mosul, the Iraqi Red Crescent said. Several terrorist groups on Sunday vowed revenge for the offensive.

The American military said Tal Afar had held up to 500 insurgents, most operating out of Sarai, a 120-acre neighborhood of tightly packed homes on the eastern edge of the city. But after entering Sarai, troops found the neighborhood abandoned and discovered tunnels intended to allow insurgents to escape an assault that had been telegraphed months ahead of time.

The two tunnel complexes were "clearly designed for terrorists to escape from Sarai," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the senior American military spokesman in Iraq. "They had seen this coming over the last four months."

He said troops had captured some insurgents who had used the tunnels but were caught at checkpoints, some wearing wigs and dressed as women. "The rats know we're closing in on them," he said.

The commanding officer of the American regiment in Tal Afar, Col. H. R. McMaster, told The Associated Press that Sarai was nearly deserted by late Saturday. "The enemy decided to bail out," he said. A report late Sunday from an A.P. correspondent embedded with American troops described a "classic guerrilla retreat" with insurgents "melting into the countryside."

American military officials said that the operation would continue but that troops had been successful in clearing much of the city of insurgents and using a large force of Iraqi troops to do much of the work - even if many Iraqi soldiers were from the Kurdish pesh merga, a militia force hated and feared by many Arabs. At least 156 enemy fighters have been killed since Aug. 26 and another 236 suspects detained, Mr. Dulaimi said.

Troops captured a car-bomb factory in the city, and General Lynch said American forces had destroyed a meeting place for insurgents who had killed at least 20 people in Tal Afar. About 40 people described as insurgents by the military were inside the building when it was bombed, he said.

Mr. Dulaimi added that troops discovered 18 arms stockpiles - enough munitions, he said, to destroy a city 10 times the size of Tal Afar, which has a population of 200,000. At least nine homes were found booby-trapped with explosives, he said.

But as with previous battles, like those in Falluja and Qaim, a western city near Syria, a large number of insurgents also escaped the fight. That makes the battle, at least in some measure, the latest example of one of the most nettlesome problems faced in the war, what one marine in Anbar Province recently described as "punching a balloon": American forces attack with overwhelming firepower only to have some insurgents leave and then return, or move on to fight elsewhere.

One year ago, Tal Afar was the scene of a major offensive to oust entrenched insurgents. After the battle, American commanders said the city was safe. But the military, stretched thin by demand for troops elsewhere, left fewer than 500 soldiers in Tal Afar and a surrounding area twice the size of Connecticut. Predictably, American officers said, the insurgents returned in force and were largely undisturbed until May, when Colonel McMaster's unit, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, was reassigned from south of Baghdad to take back the region from insurgents.

In recent days, tens of thousands of residents scrambled to leave Tal Afar as troops readied for the offensive. Ferdos al-Badi, an Iraqi Red Crescent official, said the camps included more than 2,000 families about three miles outside the city and as many as 2,500 families relocated to Mosul.

Late Sunday, an organization claiming to be linked to Al Qaeda issued a statement on Web sites regularly used by insurgent groups in which it claimed to have plans to use chemical weapons in Baghdad to retaliate for the offensive in Tal Afar.

Also on Sunday, another Web site posted an audio recording attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in which he criticized the American and Iraqi offensive in Tal Afar and said the troops would inevitably face defeat, Reuters reported.

The assault has brought a new vigor to the administration of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who has been eager to demonstrate to Iraqis that officials are working to fight terrorism. The state-run Iraqiya television channel showed repeated images of what it said were Iraqi troops conducting house-to-house searches.

Mr. Dulaimi, the normally soft-spoken defense minister, lashed out in a news conference on Sunday and warned insurgents and those who harbor them that Iraqi forces would "cut their heads and cut out their tongues."

"We will not back down," he said.

Mr. Dulaimi emphasized how the failure in the past to garrison reasonable numbers of troops in cities after military assaults had hurt the war effort. "This will not happen again," he said. "After we clean the city we are not going to leave the city open for terrorists."

He said future offensives would follow the same pattern as in Tal Afar. Assaults are likely in Sinjar and Rabia, west of Tal Afar, he said, and south to the Euphrates, where insurgents hold sway in towns along the river leading west to Syria.

Across the rest of Iraq on Sunday, insurgents killed one American soldier and wounded two more by detonating a roadside bomb near a combat patrol in Samarra, north of Baghdad, the military said.

In Basra, the British military said a patrol had been attacked with an improvised explosive device, killing one British soldier and wounding three more in the latest violence to strike the Shiite-dominated region. A senior official of the Iraqi Interior Ministry was gunned down outside his home in Baghdad early Sunday.

The American military also said it had killed a top terrorist leader in Mosul, Abu Zayd, during a raid on an insurgent safe house near the northern city. American troops have captured or killed dozens of suspected terrorist operatives in Mosul in recent months, including Muhammad Shakara, the leader of Mr. Zarqawi's network in northern Iraq, who was captured in June.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

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