Attacks force rebel retreat
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, September 11, 2005
TAL AFAR, Iraq – Insurgents staged a classic guerrilla retreat from Tal Afar on Sunday, melting into the countryside through a network of tunnels to escape an Iraqi-U.S. force that reported killing about 150 rebels while storming the militant bastion.
With the city swept clear of extremists for the second time in a year, Iraqi and U.S. military leaders vowed to redouble efforts to crush insurgents operating all along the Syrian frontier and in the Euphrates river valley.
“Tal Afar is just one piece of an overarching operation. We are not going to tolerate a safe haven anywhere in Iraq,” said Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, deputy chief of staff for coalition forces in Iraq.
As Baghdad kept a border crossing into Syria closed about 60 miles west of Tal Afar, Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi issued a warning: “The Syrians have to stop sending destruction to Iraq. We know the terrorists have no other gateway into Iraq but Syria.”
The United States and Iraq routinely charge that Syria’s government does little to stop the flow of Arab fighters across the border. Syrian leaders contend they are doing all they can.
U.S. warplanes bombed several suspected militant targets in Tal Afar last week, and the long-expected assault to again take Tal Afar was launched early Saturday by 5,000 Iraqi soldiers backed by a 3,500-strong American armored force.
By Sunday night, the joint force reported 156 insurgents killed and 246 captured. It said troops found a large bomb factory, 18 weapons caches and the network of escape tunnels beneath Tal Afar’s ancient Sarai neighborhood.
After stiff initial resistance Saturday, insurgents fell back and their stronghold was nearly deserted when the joint force moved in.
As troops continued house-to-house searches in Tal Afar, a group claiming to be an offshoot of al-Qaida in Iraq said it would strike U.S. positions and the Iraqi government in Baghdad with “chemical and unconventional weapons … unless the military operations in Tal Afar stop within 24 hours.”
Militants elsewhere killed one U.S. soldier and a British soldier in separate roadside bombings Sunday.
At least 1,897 U.S. personnel have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. Britain has reported at least 96 deaths since the war began.
Also Sunday, police said Maj. Gen. Adnan Abdul Rihman, the Interior Ministry’s director of police training, was fatally shot in front of his west Baghdad home as he waited for a ride to work.
