Click photo to play
Length: 11:28
LARA LOGAN: This is a
story about an entire city that was taken over by al
Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people
who live there became prisoners in their own homes
when terrorists took control and turned it into their
town.
They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and
launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and
Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and the
Bush administration is pointing to that operation as
a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war.
COLONEL H.R. MCMASTER, US ARMY: Al Qaeda in Iraq had
a very sophisticated strategy for taking over the
city.
LOGAN: And Colonel H.R. McMaster should know. For a
year he served as one of the military's top advisers
on fighting the Iraqi insurgency. Yet he says when he
came to Tal Afar last May, he didn't realize how
badly al Qaeda had brutalized the people.
MCMASTER: They fired mortars indiscriminately into
playgrounds, into school yards, across the
marketplace to kill innocent civilians. What they
really wanted to do was incite fear.
LOGAN: What did that actually mean, on a daily basis,
for the people living there? What was life like?
MCMASTER: Life was horrible in the city. They would
leave headless bodies in the street. They kidnapped a
young child on one occasion, killed the child, put a
booby trap inside of his body and waited for the
father to come claim the body to kill the parent.
LOGAN: Masked gunmen led by al Qaeda roamed the
streets of Tal Afar at will, publicly executing and
kidnapping people. Col. McMaster told us some of the
terrorists were foreign fighters, but many were
Iraqis from the area. Pictures of their attacks were
circulated in videos like this one, where you can
hear them chanting a call to jihad.
MCMASTER: They had schools for snipers. They had
kidnapping and murder classes that were attended by
people on the best techniques.
LOGAN: Were you surprised to learn that it was so
organized?
MCMASTER: We were surprised. You had this blending of
former military expertise and organizational ability
with--with a radical Islamic ideology, and it was
fertile ground here.
LOGAN: Col. McMaster is a soldier-scholar, known for
writing a book that found fault with military and
political leaders during the Vietnam War. As
commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry, he was given
the mission to recapture Tal Afar. He told us to
defeat an insurgency, you have to win the trust of
the people.
MCMASTER: The enemy showed the people who they really
are. These are mass murderers. These are people who
don’t respect human life. These are people who want
to choke the life out of cities like Tal Afar.
MICHAEL WARE: Al Qaeda planted its flag in Tal Afar
and said 'This is ours.'
LOGAN: Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time
Magazine, was able to take these pictures of the city
while it was still under terrorist control last
summer. This video, which we bought from him, shows
Tal Afar had become a ghost town, with the streets
deserted, shops closed and whole families so afraid
they stayed behind closed doors.
[on camera] It sounds as if al Qaeda in Iraq could do
whatever they wanted to do in Tal Afar.
WARE: Absolutely. They owned Tal Afar.
LOGAN: There was nobody to stop them.
WARE: No. They were the authority.
LOGAN: Al Qaeda used Tal Afar as a staging area for
fighters arriving from Syria to launch attacks in the
rest of Iraq.
MCMASTER: Anybody and anything could just move right
through the one legal border crossing here.
LOGAN: But that was two years into the war. Where was
the U.S. presence?
MCMASTER: The border was secured to some degree, you
know--
LOGAN: It sounds like there weren’t enough U.S.
forces on the ground to secure that border.
MCMASTER: Yeah, I think that's clear.
LOGAN: U.S. forces drove the terrorists out of Tal
Afar in 2004, but they left too few troops behind to
hold the city. Al Qaeda came flooding back and took
revenge on anyone who had helped the Americans. Col.
McMaster told us al Qaeda's strategy was to incite
civil war within Tal Afar's biggest ethnic group, the
Turkomen, by using violence to turn Turkomen Sunnis
against Turkomen Shiites.
When Time Magazine's Michael Ware met up with
McMaster's forces in August, Tal Afar was so
dangerous the soldiers had to run for cover the
moment their boots hit the ground.
[on camera] In your pictures, we see U.S. forces,
when they dismount from their armored vehicles,
they're running.
WARE: It was the only way to survive in that city.
LOGAN: Just to get from place to place?
WARE: You couldn’t even sit inside your tank without
being shot.
LOGAN: McMaster expected the bloodiest battle in a
neighborhood of the city called Sarai, where al Qaeda
had its headquarters. To help his cavalry troops, he
was relying on thousands of Iraqi infantry led by
U.S. Special Forces.
WARE: The troops I were with were what you would
loosely describe as the tip of the spear. They were
the men selected to go into the worst of the worst.
They were to drive the stake into the dark heart of
the al Qaeda stronghold.
LOGAN: On the morning of September 3, the attack
began.
For the first three days, they fought through the
city street by street. Whenever possible, they used
the rooftops to avoid booby traps al Qaeda fighters
had planted to slow them down.
Frightened families were ordered out of their homes,
as explosions echoed around them. Those who couldn't
walk were carried. There were children clutching
white flags.
By the third day of fighting, the Iraqi and American
soldiers were in place to make the final assault on
al Qaeda's stronghold. They were taking fire from a
nearby building, so American Green Berets called in
an air strike.
WARE: We had rounds cracking literally around our
heads. The bullets were whizzing in front of me and
behind me.
LOGAN: As the fighting continued, the troops were
anxious to advance, but they had orders to hold their
positions and wait two days for more civilians to get
out.
Then something Col. McMaster had not planned for:
politicians in Baghdad forced a delay of three more
days, apparently concerned about civilian casualties.
Michael Ware says to the soldiers he was with, it
looked like the delay gave al Qaeda time to escape.
WARE: The al Qaeda presence in Tal Afar was
surrounded. And the attack was primed. And then it
was stopped dead in its tracks. And so, as the troops
I was with battled throughout the day and into the
night with al Qaeda fighters so close you could throw
a stone and hit them, when we woke up the next
morning — poof — they were gone.
LOGAN: Did it cost you in terms of giving the enemy
time to get away?
MCMASTER: No.
LOGAN: Your forces were sitting outside Sarai. They
were preparing for the big battle. I mean this was
really gonna be the fight of the fight. And what
emerged was nothing.
MCMASTER: What we have to do is be flexible and adapt
to changes in the situation. And we were able to do
that.
LOGAN: When the troops finally entered the Sarai
section of Tal Afar on the ninth day of the battle,
they used tanks to blast holes through buildings so
the soldiers could move forward without being
exposed.
But after waiting so long, Michael Ware says the
momentum was gone; and, so it seemed, was the enemy.
WARE: Where an entire al Qaeda society had existed,
the troops that I was with found one body.
LOGAN: To prove they were not defeated, al Qaeda
unleashed 12 suicide bombers in a day of bloodshed in
Baghdad. They publicly called it revenge for the loss
of Tal Afar, where the U.S. Army calculated enemy
dead at 151. Eight Iraqi soldiers and one American
were also killed. But Col. McMaster told us using
numbers to measure victory is a mistake.
MCMASTER: Body counts are completely irrelevant. I
mean, what is relevant is, is the population secure
so that political development, economic development
can proceed?
LOGAN: So the U.S. military began training a new
police force right away, recruiting both Shiites and
Sunnis to patrol the streets. Schools and markets
were reopened. And Col. McMaster was able to bring
together religious leaders who hadn’t spoken for
months.
American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken
on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through
the city, he is part politician and part policeman.
SELLARS: If she has questions about her husband, she
can check at the courthouse, the Iraqi courthouse.
LOGAN: These days, he walks the streets like the pied
piper, with crowds of Iraqi children chanting his
name. They're the same streets he fought for just a
few months ago.
[on camera] You couldn't do this before the battle of
Tal Afar.
SELLARS: No way, at least not without getting into a
gunfight.
LOGAN: What does it mean to you to see these stores
open?
SELLARS: It's a sign of success. It's a sign of
victory, you know.
LOGAN: In the market with Capt. Sellars, we met Akeel
Karaja, a Sunni merchant who had just reopened his
family shop. He was eager to tell us that life in Tal
Afar had improved.
[on camera] Could you have talked to me like this
when the terrorists were here?
KARAJA: No.
LOGAN: What would have happened?
KARAJA [translator VO]: They would have cut my head.
Beheaded me.
LOGAN: He said, though, there are still people to
fear in Tal Afar. Just a month after al Qaeda was
driven out of the city, his own father was killed in
a suicide bombing.
[on camera] There were enemy fighters that got out
and lived to fight another day.
MCMASTER: Anybody who wants to come to Tal Afar as a
terrorist, I say, 'Bring 'em on.'
LOGAN: Is that a yes?
MCMASTER: If anybody tries to operate in Tal Afar,
they're gonna be detected and …
LOGAN: But is that a yes, colonel? Are they trying to
come back?
MCMASTER: Oh yes. Of course the enemy is trying to
come back. In an insurgency, there is not going to be
a big decisive battle and then the white flags come
out and it’s over, okay. But what we have here is as
close to that as you really can get.