Iraqi soldiers showing significant progress

TAL AFAR, Iraq — The Iraqi soldiers had already searched the house, according to a sticker plastered across its gate.

But when their commanding general and a U.S. colonel arrived one afternoon last week to praise their performance and observe them in action, the troops wanted to give a demonstration. With theatrical intensity, they charged the two-story structure on the nearly deserted block, rifles at the ready, while other soldiers and two reporters watched.

A fiery explosion — some soldiers said they saw a man throw a grenade, others said the door was rigged to blow — erupted from inside, followed by bursts of gunfire. The shouting soldiers stumbled out through a cloud of smoke, covered in blood. The rest of the platoon, which had lost a lieutenant in a grenade attack the day before, appeared dejected, some huddling around the wounded, others sitting with their heads in their hands.

What happened next, commanders here said, suggested significant progress toward the goal of shifting security functions to Iraqi forces so that the United States can begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. When the clashes grew intense, the Iraqi soldiers did not shrink, American officers said.

"OK, men, it's time to buck up and show our mettle," said a U.S. Special Forces soldier, acting as platoon commander, who allowed reporters to accompany the patrol on the condition that he not be named. "We can't let this stop us. We need payback!"

They went looking for revenge. When they were ambushed in a home one block away, they were ready. After a firefight, they came out smiling proudly, with several raising two fingers to indicate the number of insurgents killed.

"A couple of months ago, they might not have been able to pull it together after something like that," said Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, who witnessed the abortive raid and helped bandage an Iraqi soldier whose wounded hand was pouring blood onto the sidewalk. "They showed a lot of resolve. Eventually, they will be able to control this city."

The Tal Afar offensive, which began Sept. 2, is the largest urban military operation in Iraq since November's siege of Fallujah. Unlike many previous joint offensives, however, it is the Iraqi army that has the majority of the soldiers on the ground — 5,000 of the roughly 8,500 troops involved — that does the most intense fighting and that pays the heaviest price. At least nine Iraqi soldiers have been killed during the operation, compared with one American.

"We were not afraid. We are here to protect our country," said Pvt. Tarek Hazem, 28, of Baghdad. "All we feel is motivated to kill terrorists."

Tal Afar's Sunni Muslim majority and its strategic location on a main insurgent smuggling route, 40 miles from the Syrian border, make the operation here an important test case for the transition of security duties to Iraqis, commanders said.

"If we can get things under control and begin handing off responsibilities here, we can do it anywhere," McMaster said. "It won't happen overnight, but progress is being made."

While it has provided evidence that Iraq's security forces are improving, the operation in Tal Afar has also laid bare the challenges they face as their role expands.

Because the ranks of the Iraqi police force and army are filled mostly with Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds, they are perceived in many of the country's Sunni sections not as national forces but as factional hit squads bent on persecution. The ethnic tensions were evident in Tal Afar, a city predominated by Sunni Turkmens.

Most of the forces "are from the Badr Organization and the pesh merga," said Ibrahim Khalil, 20, one of about 4,000 Tal Afar residents, almost all of them Sunnis, living in a makeshift camp established by the Iraqi Red Crescent outside the city. He was referring to the country's predominant Shiite and Kurdish militias, respectively.

"They wear the military uniform for disguise," he said. "Their treatment is very bad. They were taking people to detention prisons just because they are Sunnis since the start of the military campaign."

The Iraqi soldiers from the pesh merga, which has long supported Kurdish forces fighting the Turkish government, spoke openly of their zeal to fight Tal Afar's Sunni Turkmen-led insurgency, according to U.S. soldiers who worked closely with them.