U.S. troops bomb Tel Affar despite parliament speaker’s warning :

By Azzaman08/21/05 "Azzaman"

-- -- U.S. troops have been bombing the city of Tel Affar in the past four days despite warnings from parliamentary speaker Hajim al-Hassani.

For months, the troops have been striving to control the city and the adjacent region close to the Syrian border but to no avail.

Fierce fighting is reported between U.S. troops and the insurgents who have turned the northern city west of Mosul into a major stronghold.

Thousands of families are reported to have fled the city. In interviews with Azzaman correspondent in Tel Affar, the residents described the U.S. shelling of their city “as fires of hell.

” International media organizations, whose representatives have shut themselves up in luxury hotels in Baghdad for fear of kidnapping, have apparently imposed a news blackout on the situation in Tel Affar, our correspondent says.

Tel Affar is a big city with 300,000 people, plus another 270,000 in the suburbs, giving a total of 570,000.

Most of them are Turkomen, an ethnic Turkish group in Iraq, long neglected by the Arab-dominated central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional authorities in Arbil.

The shelling has so far killed several people and wounded many others.

Those staying behind suffer from lack of water, food and health services.

Even the city’s historic castle reputed for its ancient dwellings and settlements has not escaped the U.S. shelling.

Hassani, the speaker, had warned last month that the use of military force to solve the crisis in Tel Affar would further destabilize rather than pacify an already restive region.

Azzaman correspondent, whose identity we withhold for security reasons, reported residents as saying that life has come to a standstill in the city.

And those who opted to flee are in even worse condition, he added. “The people are too scared to go out and recover corpses of dead relatives or tend the wounded.

“U.S. troops have ringed the city and now prevent people from either leaving or entering the city,” he said.

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