Joint Raid on ‘Haven’ for Foreign Fighters Finds It Mostly Empty

Iraqi and U.S. troops sweeping through the northern city of Tall Afar on Sunday killed 15 suspected rebels and discovered a bomb factory during the second day of a high-profile counterinsurgency offensive, Iraqi officials said.

About 5,000 Iraqi and 3,500 U.S. soldiers rummaging through the bombed-out mountain city found booby-trapped buildings, underground tunnels and large weapons caches but encountered little fighting during two days of operations, the officials said.

Residents estimated that 90% of the people in the city of 200,000 had fled, many to a crowded tent camp outside town.

As in similar offensives in other cities and towns this year, most of the rebels appear to have fled into the countryside before U.S. and Iraqi forces entered.

The joint operation has been heavily covered on state-controlled Iraqi television. For two days, the Al Iraqiya channel has frequently shown footage of Iraqi soldiers kicking in doors as they hunt for rebels in Tall Afar, which had been the site of insurgent attacks on American and Iraqi forces.

In Baghdad, Iraqi officials have provided regular updates on the fighting and announced plans to push into other cities along the border with Syria, including Sinjar, Rabia, Qaim and Akashat.

The offensive was assailed by some government critics. They charged that such operations served more to exacerbate tensions in a city with a mixed Shiite and Sunni Muslim population and divert attention from the government’s failure to rebuild the country than to defeat the insurgency.

“What is going on there is nothing but a sectarian purge within an official cover,” said Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader. “This kind of policy would bring nothing but more bloodshed, more chaos and more destruction to Iraq.”

But in a televised news conference Sunday, Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi praised the offensive and the conduct of Iraqi troops.

“What is happening in Tall Afar is an example of what should happen in other troubled places of Iraq,” said Dulaimi, a member of the same large tribe as Adnan Dulaimi. “The Tall Afar operation is a quality operation by all measures.”

The government’s upbeat assessments were reflected in the images on state-controlled television. Iraqis often criticize the nascent armed forces for firing their weapons wildly into the air.

But Sunday night, Al Iraqiya showed Iraqi soldiers in desert camouflage alertly marching through empty Tall Afar neighborhoods and calmly guarding about 20 bound, blindfolded suspected insurgents.

The station showed a demonstration of about 150 Tall Afar residents holding banners declaring: “We call on the government to kick out terrorists from Tall Afar.”

One young man told an interviewer, “What we want from the Iraqi government is to kill those terrorists.”

Inhabitants of the camp outside the city described dire conditions, with more than 550 families crowded into 500 tents set up by overburdened relief workers. They spoke of demolished homes and said children were killed in the fighting. They also complained of being harassed by Iraqi soldiers and going without medical care in the camp, which they said soldiers would not let them leave.

“The American forces and Iraqi soldiers ordered us to leave our houses,” said Khudair Yas, a 50-year-old Tall Afar resident living in the camp.

“We left without extra clothes or food to a camp which has become like a prison.”

A U.S.-led assault on Tall Afar almost a year ago also aimed to drive out insurgents. The government says foreign fighters have again turned the city into a haven.

Dulaimi, the defense minister, said “all terrorist infiltrators” had entered the country across Iraq’s nearly 400-mile border with Syria.

But Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, speaking on CNN during a visit to the U.S., said the Syrian government was feeling pressure to crack down on Islamic militants.

“I think Syrians are also starting to feel that terrorism is their enemy also, and there are some activities of terrorists inside Syria,” he said.

In the northern city of Samarra, meanwhile, a U.S. soldier was killed and two were injured by a roadside bomb Sunday morning. A British soldier was killed and three Britons were injured near the southern city of Basra, a British official told the Reuters news agency.

Maj. Gen. Adnan Abdul Hamza, a high-ranking Interior Ministry official, was gunned down Sunday morning as he headed to work from his home in the capital’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, a site of frequent sectarian violence. A roadside blast in Fallouja killed an Iraqi soldier and injured four.

The U.S. military announced that its forces had killed an Al Qaeda operative nicknamed “Abu Zayd” during a raid near Mosul.

A news release said the man had coordinated “kidnappings, extortion, murder, intimidation of Mosul citizens and attacks against Iraqi security and coalition forces.”

Times staff writers Suhail Ahmad and Shamil Aziz and a special correspondent near Tall Afar contributed to this report.