TALL AFAR, Iraq -- A three-foot-high coil of razor wire, 21-ton armored vehicles and American soldiers with black M-4 assault rifles stood between tens of thousands of people and their homes last week.
At Checkpoint 301 on Tall Afar's eastern edge, cars packed with families and their belongings stretched back five miles. Hundreds of Iraqi men pushed toward a slim opening in the razor-wire fence, where two U.S. soldiers waited to frisk them before they reentered the city.
Men are detained by U.S. troops searching for insurgents as they allow the return of residents to the city of Tall Afar.
(Steve Fainaru -- The Washington Post)
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"Back off!" one of the soldiers shouted into the restless crowd. "Back! Off!"
The repopulation of Tall Afar, a city the size of Louisville, is only part of the U.S. military's task here after putting down an insurgency that had taken control of the local government. Like other U.S. units scattered across Iraq, the Americans here are trying to meet the needs of people desperate to see their city return to normal, while simultaneously battling armed insurgents who want to drive the U.S. troops from the country.
Fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents this month killed an estimated 180 guerrillas and no Americans in this city, according to U.S. military officials. Hakki M. Majdal, deputy director of Tall Afar General Hospital, said 55 Iraqis were killed and 157 injured; many were civilians, including seven women and seven children, Majdal said, holding a list of the casualties.
Far more numerous than the dead and wounded, however, were the people who fled the fighting in this hilly agricultural city of 250,000 people about 60 miles from the Syrian border. U.S. officers estimated that 150,000 residents were displaced, leaving Tall Afar a virtual ghost town when U.S. forces regained control of the city last Sunday. When Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, traveled into the city Thursday to meet the new local government, many shops remained closed. Scattered pedestrians walked the narrow streets in the blast-furnace heat as people trickled back into the city.
"I think Tall Afar will once again be a great city," Ham told the new mayor, Mohammed Rashid Hamid, as the two walked down the street, surrounded by armed U.S. troops and Iraqi police. "And I don't think it will take very long."
But the fighting has pushed reconstruction in Tall Afar back to square one. In a meeting Wednesday at the Army's Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tall Afar, Maj. Tom O'Steen told Hamid: "I'd just like to start the meeting by asking the new mayor if we could confirm his name."
Ham said he had requested $3 million in emergency funding to rebuild Tall Afar's infrastructure. A team of civil affairs officers is working with Iraqi officials to restore basic services, including water and electricity, which U.S. forces had turned off for at least three days during the fighting.
A U.S. Army colonel handed out $200 bonuses -- the equivalent of about a month's salary -- to the 83 Tall Afar police officers who fought with the Americans; 517 others either deserted or joined the insurgents, U.S. military officers said. The Iraqis who switched sides included the police chief and his deputy, both of whom were detained by U.S. forces.
"We have to start from the beginning," the new police chief, Col. Ishmael Mohammed Shuaub, said Wednesday in a meeting with U.S. officers at their base near Tall Afar. "We must forget history now."
The insurgents' takeover here "wasn't something we expected," Ham acknowledged. U.S. intelligence officers and commanders said it grew out of an informal alliance of Sunni Muslim extremists connected to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian believed to be linked to al Qaeda; Shiite Muslim followers of rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr; holdovers from Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath Party; other disaffected Iraqis; and foreign fighters.
Commanders and soldiers from the U.S. Army's 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said they noticed a spike in attacks against U.S. forces in Tall Afar soon after Sadr and his followers left the southern city of Najaf in late August, following three weeks of intense fighting.
Lt. Col. Karl Reed, the battalion's commander, said that shortly after the Najaf agreement, fighters began to appear in Tall Afar wearing the black clothing associated with the Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia.
