Page 218 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

720 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

In 2004 Sunni extremists, known as Takfiri, and disenfranchised Iraqi nationalists had
come together in a marriage of convenience to seize control of the city and use it as a base
of operations for their resistance against American forces and the nascent Iraqi government.
For both symbolic and logistical reasons, the city was at the center of Jordanian terrorist
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s strategy of fomenting sectarian violence to undermine the
American effort in Iraq. According to the deputy provincial governor of Nineveh, Khasro
Goran, over 500 insurgents terrorized the city of nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants
through their tactics, which were able to “project a level of fear and intimidation… far in
excess of the numbers.” Tall ‘Afar’s civic leadership, the little that existed, was suspected
of being in league with the insurgents; the over 80 tribes in the region exercised the real
leadership. New York Times reporter Richard A. Oppel, Jr., called Tall ‘Afar a “Magnet for
Iraq Insurgents,” who had spread their web of influence by taking over distant villages that
could provide sanctuary only a “short distance from Mosul…, [itself] an active insurgent
hub.” Insurgents easily passed through holes in the berm demarcating Syria from Iraq and
holed up in safe havens scattered about the countryside. Tall ‘Afar was a “town that was,
for all practical purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in their
thrall.” 9
The intimidation campaign ranged from bombings, assassinations, and mortar and rocket
attacks, to beheadings intended to terrify the city’s Shiites. In one instance, the insurgents
had kidnapped and pressed into service a 14-year old boy. According to Glasgow Sunday
Herald writer David Pratt, the boy revealed that insurgents had sodomized and “abused”
him, and then had assigned him the task of restraining the “legs of victims they beheaded.”
Hickey recounted that the boy’s aim in life was to rise eventually to the point where he
would become the executioner. An unnamed Coalition spokesman in Baghdad compared
Tall ‘Afar to something “‘from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.’” The insurgents’
campaign, despite its viciousness, was neither mindless nor without purpose, although
the disparate aims of the constituent groups reflected their equally disparate origins and
interests. Insurgent leaders fully appreciated the symbolism in their terrorizing a city that
only a year before had been a battlefield for US and Iraqi forces in Operation BLACK
tYPHooN. 10
In 2003 Tall ‘Afar had been under the control of the 101st Airborne Division,
commanded by MG David Petraeus; by the summer of 2004 a single infantry company
from a follow-on unit patrolled the city. According to neurologist Dr. Hakki M. Majdal,
deputy director of Tall ‘Afar General Hospital, the city’s grave economic conditions and
growing aggravation over the US occupation of Iraq made the city fertile ground for the
insurgency. Led by the Stryker–mounted 3d Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 2d Infantry
Division, US and Iraqi forces retook the city in fighting that lasted from 9 through 12

for a Civil War in Iraq” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, working draft, rev.
27 September 2005), 1–3; Yingling, interview; Michael Knights, “Northern Iraq Faces Increased Instability
in 2005,” Janes Intelligence Review, February 2005, 30.
9 Packer, 2, 5; Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Magnet for Iraq Insurgents is Test for U.S. Strategy,” New York Times,
16 June 2005.
10 Packer, 2; David Pratt, “The Battle to Control the Streets of Tal Afar, Iraq: Purging the Insurgents,” Sunday
Herald (Glasgow), 1 January 2006; Cordesman, “War for a Civil War,” 28.