Under Pressure, Rebels Abandon an Iraqi Stronghold

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: September 12, 2005

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.

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