Joint Force Targets Town Near Syria Border

Thousands of Iraqi army troops, backed by U.S. forces, launched a major assault Saturday in the northern insurgent stronghold of Tall Afar, with Iraqi government officials stressing that the offensive was part of a long-range strategy to stop foreign fighters entering the country from Syria.

American artillery and warplanes began bombing Tall Afar’s Sareya neighborhood before 2 a.m., clearing the way for Iraqi special forces units to enter the city. As many as 5,000 members of the Iraqi army’s 3rd Division and the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are participating in the operation.

As soldiers searched house-to-house and detained hundreds of suspects, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and several of his ministers launched a media offensive here, predicting a rapid and successful operation.

The fighting, said Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi, will be “shorter than you think.... You will see in the coming two days that our forces are capable of expelling terrorists from their places and exterminating them.”

The assault came after several days of sporadic clashes between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi forces who had amassed outside Tall Afar in preparation.

A major town near the Syrian border, Tall Afar has been viewed by U.S. and Iraqi officials as a prime entry point for foreign fighters planning to attack American military and Iraqi security targets. The town is ethnically split between Sunni Arabs, who are viewed as the primary force behind the insurgency, and Turkmens.

Tall Afar’s Sunni mayor, Mohammed Rasheed, tendered his resignation Saturday to protest what he called the operation’s targeting of Sunni neighborhoods, Associated Press reported.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in a nationally televised statement Saturday night, announced further measures to choke the flow of foreign fighters from Syria. These include indefinitely closing the main northern border crossing near the town of Rabea and establishing a 3-mile-wide security zone with an 8 p.m. curfew and a ban on carrying weapons. Only longtime residents of the area will be allowed in the security zone, Jabr said.

Jafari, meanwhile, said the Tall Afar operation was a top government priority.

“We are in constant contact with the city to know the truth as it is on the ground,” he said.

Iraq’s ministers of defense, interior, health and trade said three months of careful planning had preceded the offensive, including shipping two months’ worth of food to the nearby city of Mosul for a possible influx of refugees and creating a 240-bed field hospital for casualties.

The public information effort comes as Jafari’s government struggles to overcome public resentment about the deaths of Shiite pilgrims during a stampede on a Baghdad bridge last month. The incident, in which more than 900 people were trampled or drowned, has been blamed in part on ill-planned security restrictions.

Not all agreed that planning for the Tall Afar offensive had been comprehensive. As residents fleeing the town began arriving in Mosul, residents there complained of a lack of adequate government support for those displaced by the attack.

“Families are homeless, and the government has not provided any shelter, food or drink for them,” said Sheik Ezzedin Dowla, a Turkmen tribal leader reached by phone.

The main relief, he said, has come in the form of a small refugee camp organized by local political parties.

Some residents of Tall Afar complained of indiscriminate arrests and detentions by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

“They don’t distinguish between the honest and the criminals,” said a 26-year-old medical assistant in Tall Afar’s main hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Every house in Tall Afar now has at least two detainees, even if the family was all women and children.”

The medical assistant also said there had been no serious casualties reported, a probable indication that most insurgents in the city had fled during the military buildup.

In Baghdad, the international airport reopened Saturday after the Ministry of Transportation settled its dispute with a British firm providing security there. The airport, the city’s only reliable link to the outside world, closed Friday when the Global Strategies Group protested what it said was nonpayment of millions of dollars owed by the Iraqi government.

South of Baghdad, the bodies of 17 Shiite Muslim men were discovered near the town of Latifiya, an insurgent hot spot. The men were said to have been among a group from a nearby town who had been detained by men reportedly wearing Iraqi army uniforms.

A special correspondent in Mosul contributed to this report.