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Nermeen Al-Mufti 18/09/2005
source : Al-Ahram

Iraqi soldiers pass through a gate in Tel Afar, northwest Iraq. The US and Iraqi commanders said more than 400 suspects were captured during the offensive to retake the northern town

Writing stories from Iraq is not an easy job for an Iraqi journalist nowadays. I don't mean security-wise; but as an Iraqi I feel more pain each time an Iraqi city or town is attacked, in addition to the ongoing organised assassinations, kidnappings, car bombs and the urgent shortage of general services.

The Americans and high-ranking Iraqi officials claim that foreign terrorists are in Tel Afar, a town 500 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, and have, since the third week of August, unleashed an 8,500-strong US-Iraqi military attack. The town has been besieged from the north by 5,000 Iraqi forces and from the south by 3,500 US forces. Meanwhile, thousands left everything they had behind, to save their lives from the new strike on their city.

Tel Afar is one of the oldest inhabited towns of Iraq. About 400,000 Turkomens live in the town and surrounding villages. They are proud of the Assyrian fortress and wall that characterise this ancient place. This town was the northern base of the 1920 war launched by the Iraqis against the British occupation. Since then, Tel Afar has always been proud of being Iraqi and Turkomen. Around the town lie huge oil-rich fields and reservoirs. Kurdish leaders, while insisting that federalism must be enshrined in the still-to-be-finalised Iraqi constitution, recently submitted a "map of Kurdistan" to the National Assembly. Tel Afar appeared on that map.

"Tens of civilians were killed and tens were wounded in the initial strike," Hossam Aldeen, chairman of the National Turkomen Movement, told Al-Ahram Weekly. The movement is in touch, though infrequently, via phone with those who stayed in Tel Afar. The Iraqi Turkomen Front (ITF), meanwhile, is doing its best to save civilians and try to ensure the end of the offensive as quickly as possible. A close source to the ITF told the Weekly that, "since the beginning of the strike, ITF is in continuous contact with the American and Iraqi forces," adding that, "we were promised that they would not attack houses, though house-to-house searches are taking place, especially in Hassan Koy and Sarai, where they said the terrorists are based."

With the help of the Iraqi Red Crescent and Turkish aid organisations, the ITF is preparing tents in Kirkuk, Mosul, and surrounding Turkomen towns, for the displaced around Tel Afar. According to Turkomen relief agencies, the situation inside Tel Afar and the camps around is very dangerous, putting women, children and the elderly at immediate and grave risk.

Reports say that coalition forces are preventing humanitarian aid, food supplies or medicine from entering the town. Electricity and water has been cut.

Hajj Ibrahim Hassan, 68, a retired teacher, does not know if there are foreign fighters in the city but asked, "even if there are, is it fair to destroy a whole town forcing tens of thousands out of the city?" Accompanied by his 18-member family, Hassan lives in an eight-person capacity tent outside the town. "We left everything behind. Our town was very peaceful at the start of the American occupation. We, the Shia and Sunni Turkomens in Tel Afar used to live together."

Turkomens feel they are enduring an attempt to "Kurdisise" Kirkuk and other Turkomen cities through demographic means. "They began to expel us through such crimes as attacks, kidnappings and killings," Hassan added. "Tel Afar is a tribal area. The tribal customs could not bear being expulsed without defending themselves; so by the second half of the last year Tel Afar became a war-torn desert."

The Iraqi Islamic Party and the General Congress of Ahl Al-Sunna announced, "The strike against Tel Afar aims at aborting the participation of the Sunnis in the political process." The Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, used the same pretext used by Iyad Allawi, the former interim prime minister, when he ordered the strike on Falluja last year which left 70 per cent of the town levelled: "We received a signed letter from the sheikhs of the tribes asking us to save their people from the terrorists."

The Iraqi minister of defence warned that many other cities in western Iraq would be attacked in order to drive out foreign terrorists. He accused Syria of exporting them to Iraq.

According to an official American communiqué, "156 insurgents were killed and 246 captured, a big bomb factory was discovered, in addition to 18 weapons caches and a tunnel network in the ancient Sarai neighbourhood of the town." After days of bombings, occupation forces found the town practically empty on their ground deployment. They suspect that the wanted terrorists might have escaped through this tunnel network.

Meanwhile, the Rabeeaa crossing border point between Iraq and Syria, close to Tel Afar was closed. The Americans announced they began the siege of Rutba, about 600 kilometres west of Baghdad -- also close to Syria -- as well as the towns of Rawa and Ramadi. According to the Americans, Rutba is a stronghold for terrorists.

The Americans promised Iraqis that the Tel Afar strike would end before Thursday; however, to make things worse Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi threatened in a taped message to use chemical weapons in attacks on Tel Afar had not the US-Iraqi attacks ceased by Monday dawn. Some reports say that the Pentagon amended the American policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons against governmental and non-governmental enemies who would use weapons of mass destruction against Americans.

Iraqis, meanwhile, are but collateral damage in a war waged on their land between American occupiers and their terrorist counterparts. While the two vie off and settle accounts, Iraqi men, women and children pay the price: killed every day, while the world remains ignorant and silent, in order to make America "safer".

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