Tal Afar: Al Qaeda's Town

"This is a story about an entire city that was taken over by al Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people who live there became prisoners in their own homes when terrorists took control and turned it into their town."

"They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and as Lara Logan reports, the Bush administration is pointing to that operation as a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war."

Here's a story that lends further credence to the idea that the violence Iraq is being allowed to happen. This is from one of the segments on the TV news magazine 60 Minutes, that I just watched.

The story in a nutshell, is about a city in Iraq that was taken over by Al Qaeda, who apparently had an easy time crosing back and forth across the border with Syria. Here comes the cavalry. U.S. troops went in and cleaned out the town, but then left only a handfull of troops to guard the place, and, you guessed it, Al Qaeda just walked right back in and picked up where they left off. That was in 2004. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops went back and cleaned it out again, this time sticking around and training a police force. Success!!

Well now you just know there's more to the story than that. First thing you notice is that there was absolutely no one in that entire city of 200,000 people, to protect them. The second problem was that when we finally did go in, we did just like we did in Vietnam; take a village, then leave it for the enemy to go right back in. And the third and most interesting part, was when troops went back for the second time. They surrounded the city and had completely encircled the terrorists' headquarters ready for final battle to wipe them out, when they were ordered to wait two days to let the civilians get out first. After that, they were ordered to wait another three days, supposedly to let more civilians get to safetly. Ok, time for the assault, but guess what, there was nobody there to fight. Yep, they all got away.

Now I don't know about you, but it looks to me like the delay was meant as much to allow for the terrorist to get away, as the innocent. Of course, no one's going to admit that, and they don't seem to have even bothered checking the people that were leaving at all. Here at home, we can't get on a damned airplane without taking off our shoes, walking through metal detectors, forfeiting "dangerous" personal property like nail files, and being man-handled, or denied simply because we have a name on some watch list, but in Iraq, terrorist are intentionally allowed to fight another day. The soldiers are doing the best they can, but those in charge seem to constantly treat "the terrorists" just like allies.

Even after allowing an unkown number of terrorists to escape, the administration calls the operation a model for success in Iraq. This whole story stinks with the smell of neocon colonialism. It stands as an example for why there's so much violence there, and it's to getting worse. But, that's the plan.