Iraqi Success Story: Tal Afar
Tal Afar: Al Qaeda’s Town - CBS News
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 as Lara Logan reports, the Bush administration is pointing to that operation as a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war.
“Al Qaeda in Iraq had a very sophisticated strategy for taking over the city,” says Colonel H.R. McMaster.
He should know. For a year, Col. McMaster 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.
Kudos to CBS News for actually reporting this.
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