Operation shows Iraqi troops' skills

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

But when their commanding general and a US colonel arrived one afternoon recently to praise their performance and observe them in action, the troops wanted to give a demonstration.

They charged the two-story structure, rifles at the ready, as other soldiers and two reporters watched from the street.

A fiery explosion erupted from inside, followed by bursts of gunfire. The soldiers stumbled out through smoke, covered in blood. The rest of the platoon, which had lost a lieutenant in a grenade attack the day before, seemed dejected.

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

''OK, men, it's time to buck up and show our mettle," said a US special forces soldier acting as platoon commander, who allowed reporters to accompany the patrol on the condition that he not be named. ''We need payback!"

They went looking for revenge. When they were ambushed again, in a home a 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 Colonel H.R. McMaster, commander of the US Army's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment.

McMaster, who saw the raid and helped to bandage an Iraqi soldier whose wounded hand sent blood onto the sidewalk, said, ''They showed a lot of resolve."

The Tal Afar offensive, which began Sept. 2, is the largest urban military operation in Iraq since the siege of Fallujah in November. Unlike with many 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.

And it is the Iraqi Army that does the most intense fighting and that paid the heaviest price. At least nine Iraqi soldiers have been killed during the operation, compared with one American.

''We are here to protect our country," said Private Tarek Hazem, 28, of Baghdad, his hands and uniform red with the blood of men he helped treat when the building exploded.

Tal Afar's Sunni Muslim majority and its location on a main insurgent smuggling route, 40 miles from Iraq's border with Syria, makes the operation in the city 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."

But while it has provided evidence that the capabilities of Iraq's security forces are improving, the operation in Tal Afar has also laid bare the challenges.

Because the ranks of the Iraqi police and army are filled mostly with Shi'ite Arabs and ethnic Kurds, they are perceived in many Sunni sections not as national forces, but as factional hit squads bent on persecution. The tensions were evident in Tal Afar, a city of 200,000, largely Sunni Turkmens.

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

''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."

The Iraqi soldiers from the peshmerga, which for many years was targeted by the Sunni-led army of Saddam Hussein and has long supported Kurdish forces fighting the Turkish government, spoke openly of their zeal to fight the Tal Afar insurgency, led by Sunni Turkmen, according to US soldiers who worked with them.

Meanwhile, US commanders grounded the mostly Shi'ite police commandos a few days into the operation, alleging overly aggressive tactics.

''The Iraqi Army are the real terrorists," said Adnan Hussein, 39, who moved with his family to the camp for displaced residents. ''They enter our houses and turn everything upside down"

Military commanders stressed that the Iraqi Army's Third Division is a force that represents all ethnic and sectarian groups, even though it is led by Major General Khorsheed Salim, a former deputy commander of the peshmerga. US commanders said they worked to encourage more Sunnis to become police officers or soldiers, but were thwarted by insurgents threatening to kill anyone who joined.