IRAQ: US forces are being sucked into "ethnic civil war" in attacking Tal Afar, writes Michael Jansen
The US-Iraqi assault on the city of Tal Afar is seen by Arab Sunnis and some western commentators as a punishment of Sunni Turkomen for supporting the Sunni Arab resistance.
They point out that when the US and Iraqi troops entered Tal Afar on Sunday, they found most insurgents had fled and there had been few foreign fighters based there. Iraqi troops were given the task of carrying out house-to-house searches to collect any weapons and gain intelligence on the insurgents. Houses were looted and ransacked.
While most of Tal Afar's men, women and children left ahead of the onslaught, men who remained to secure their homes were rounded up and confronted by masked informers, who identified alleged militants and their sympathisers who were taken away in lorries to a US camp. US military sources say few selected by informers are insurgents or yield any useful information.
Iraqi army units employed in this operation have been drawn from the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia which has no love for ethnic Turks and is fighting Turkomen for control of the oil city of Kirkuk. The informers are mainly Shia Turkomen, who account for 30 per cent of the residents of Tal Afar, and are settling feuds with the 70 per cent Sunni Turkomen majority.
According to Juan Cole, an authoritative source at the University of Michigan who closely follows events in Iraq, the campaign was initiated by Shia prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari in response to a call from local Shia Turkomen.
Dr Jaafari visited Tal Afar on Monday in spite of a $100,000 bounty on his life offered by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In Dr Cole's view, the Tal Afar campaign is "ethnic civil war."
"The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct to a Kurdish-Shia alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their Turkomen supporters."
Tal Afar - with a population of 400,000 - has suffered instability and insecurity over the past 18 months. Following a devastating US attack a year ago, most residents fled temporarily.
Since the ongoing operation was launched, 3,000 families out of a total of 50,000 have sought refuge in inadequate and squalid camps near Mosul and at the village of Abu Maria.
But it is not clear how many have homes to which they can return, due to bombing and destruction during and after the fighting.
Commentators make the comparison between Tal Afar and the central Iraqi city of Falluja, devastated by a US onslaught last November, and warn that rendering homeless such a large number of people can only fuel Sunni resentment and secure fresh recruits for the resistance.
Rising tension between the Shia-Kurdish coalition and Sunnis has prolonged bickering over the constitution, and prevented a final text from being printed and distributed to Iraqis ahead of the October 15th referendum.