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DEL.ICIO.USWhen the clocks stopped in Tal Afar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tal Afar, Iraq — Amid the rubble are clues that a sinister chapter of Iraqi history was written here just hours ago:
A red-and-white stuffed toy, lodged forcibly into a crevice.
Crimson tomatoes spilled onto the splintered bricks and crumpled corrugated metal of a storefront.
A tan rubber sandal that once slipped onto the left foot of a child.
Bulldozers remove slabs of concrete, mangled cars and twisted wreckage. People carry away whatever belongings they can salvage. They are still looking for loved ones they have not seen since the clocks stopped here at 4 p.m. Tuesday.
• Click here for photos of the tragedy in Tal Afar
That’s when a massive bomb exploded in this busy shopping area.
“They found another body,” a neighborhood man screams.
A torso of a woman is placed in the bed of a pickup truck. A turquoise wrap holds feet, arms and other body parts.
“They are still searching for her head,” the man says.
The stench of death is fresh in al-Wahada, a predominately Shiite neighborhood in Tal Afar, a town that sits 65 miles east of the Syrian border. What had been a place of relative peace now withers in fear.
“Where can we live after such an attack?” school teacher Khalil Ibrahim asks 2nd Lt. Ryan Swinford, a Florida National Guard soldier who helps train local security forces. “What about my children? There is no police. No life.”
Swinford tells the desperate man that he is sorry. The soldier has two young children himself at home in Tavares, Fla.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be an Iraqi solution,” he says.
It’s a sentence he utters a lot these days as the United States tries to stand up local authorities.
“Where is our government?” asks the man, pointing to his modest house, partially destroyed in the explosion.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Swinford says.
He doesn’t know either what the next few days or weeks will bring. No one can say yet whether the recent spate of violence — a suicide bombing Saturday night, two on Tuesday followed by a night of vicious revenge killings — portends more sectarian strife here.
Tal Afar has been largely spared the senseless sectarian killings that shake Iraq almost every day. So much so that President Bush a year ago touted Tal Afar as the nation’s model for security, calling it “a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.”
This week, freedom is reduced to quick death. Hope is that a missing family member will still be found.
• • •
Tuesday afternoon, al-Wahada residents flocked to a truck carrying goods from a humanitarian organization, a magnet for poor people who had not seen such a shipment in months. The truck carried flour. It also carried a suicide bomber with 10,000 pounds of TNT.
The explosion looked like a mushroom cloud from nearby Forward Operating Base Sykes, the U.S. military post in Tal Afar. Even there, the earth trembled.
Minutes later, a second truck exploded in another, more mixed neighborhood. Police say that truck detonated prematurely before reaching the target area in al-Wahada.
At least 85 people died in the bombings; many were children. Another 200 were injured.
People in al-Wahada clawed through the destruction with their bare hands. Dust and flour combined to cover the dead with an eerie layer of white powder and streams of their own blood.
U.S. soldiers on the scene were sickened by what they saw. Some vomited.
The hallways and courtyards of Tal Afar General Hospital filled quickly. The victims were mostly Shiites.
Shiite anger against their Sunni neighbors erupted Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, and Shiite gunmen continued the carnage. They knocked on doors and asked the men in Sunni households to come out. The gunmen, some of whom were Shiite Iraqi policemen, told the Sunni men they were looking for information about the explosions.
Then they put pistols to their heads and pulled the triggers.
About 70 Sunni men were blindfolded, handcuffed and killed, execution style. The vengeful bloodletting did not stop until the Iraqi army intervened.
Tal Afar General Hospital filled again, this time with Sunnis.
• • •
Thursday morning, Hasina Mohammed Amin sits next to a white metal gurney at the hospital. The day before, it carried the limp bodies of victims.
Her family, from the Sunni Nadar tribe, owned two shops in al-Wahada — one sold women’s clothing; the other carried automotive spare parts. The latter was destroyed in the bombing.
The knock on the door came late that night. The intruders were wearing Iraqi police uniforms, she says; they threw 25 men in her extended family into one room and shot them. One was her husband.
“Why? Why?” she says, wailing to the doctors and U.S. soldiers at the hospital. “I have eight children. I need someone to protect me. Please.”
Then she stands up and whispers into a translator’s ear so Iraqi security forces standing nearby cannot hear.
“I am scared of the I.P.,” she says of the local Iraqi police.
Her back is to a window that opens out onto a small garden of red poppies and golden coreopsis. When the hospital ran out of room, staffers laid the dead atop the flowers.
The white lab coat of Dr. Ali Hussein Mustafa is stained with dried blood. He is horrified by the week’s events, not just as a doctor but also as a Sunni.
“If one terrorist is Sunni, we cannot say all Sunnis are bad,” he says, adding the same about Shiites.
Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, sectarian violence has spiraled in this troubled land.
In Tal Afar, Shiites form 60 percent of the population and occupy neighborhoods mainly to the south of a medieval, hilltop castle. The Sunnis live to the north, though some neighborhoods are mixed.
Though Tal Afar has seen its share of bloodshed — the insurgency raged here until an American offensive quelled it in the fall of 2005 — it had been largely free of sectarian killing until now. Many of the city’s 250,000 residents who fled earlier fighting were starting to return home.
“We had the calm before the storm,” says Staff Sgt. George Kakaletris, of the 10th Psychological Operations Battalion, who was here in 2005 when the “violence was unbearable.”
Today, Kakaletris is trying to cull information from local Sunnis about the reprisal killings. When he walks outside, it is already afternoon. The winter chill is gone. “Warm weather,” he says. “The violence always gets worse when it gets warm.”
There is speculation, too, that with an increased U.S.-Iraqi military presence in Baghdad, the bloodshed is spreading outward from the capital.
U.S. soldiers working with Iraqi security forces here say the recent atrocities are a big step backward, especially because Iraqi policemen are implicated in the revenge killings.
Dr. Salih Haider, Tal Afar General Hospital’s administrator, says Sunni residents are frightened.
“It’s a very dangerous situation for us,” he tells American soldiers who are trying to decipher what steps to take next. Haider says 90 percent of the people here trust the Iraqi Army, made up of soldiers who hail from all parts of Iraq and represent various ethnic groups and religions. The police, he says, are mostly local Shiites who can be swayed easily by sectarian preferences.
“Nobody,” he says, “trusts the I.P.”
• • •
Late Thursday, Tal Afar remains under curfew. Shops are shuttered. Few people dare to walk the streets. Five mortar shells fell earlier on another Shiite district.
Policemen suspected of participating in the reprisal killings were released, though local authorities did not provide a reason. The provincial government of Ninevah, to which Tal Afar belongs, is considering reconciliation talks between the city’s Shiite and Sunni leaders.
Soldiers at FOB Sykes are on alert. Regular patrols head into the city to keep watch. Even Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN)(LRS), the Fort Gillem-based Georgia Army National Guard unit that specializes in long-range surveillance on the Syrian border, is sending soldiers into Tal Afar.
At al-Wahada, the cleanup continues. As do the prayers of people who say this: Everything is in Allah’s hands. How can anyone but God control such tragedy?
Swinford, the Florida reservist, is frustrated and weary from the chilling images around him.
“I feel helpless,” he says, standing before an entire block of houses destroyed by the truck bomb and trying to assess the madness. “I’m really hoping this is an isolated incident.”
In other words, this is not Baghdad. Yet.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Reports from Iraq
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By Alvin F.
March 30, 2007 10:35 AM | Link to this
Another outstanding report by Ms Basu, Mr Favorite and the AJC! Again, nothing like being at the right place and the right time.
This follow up to the terrible market bombings and reprisal killings in Tal Afar really highlights the incredible suffering of average Iraqi people. (Mr Favorite’s photo of Mrs Amin is incredible).
And the story is told with both intelligence and compassion.
Thank you Ms Basu and Mr Favorite for your courage and dedication. Of note, NPR relied on your observations Ms Basu and…
one wonders “where are The New York Times and The Washington Post”?
The AJC ought to really continue its international coverage, especially of this most terrible war in Iraq…from the likes of such journalists as Ms Basu!
Keep up the fine work! And thank you.
Alvin F.
By Tracey
March 31, 2007 8:09 AM | Link to this
I knew it was only a matter of time before the insurgents moved to Tal Afar and to the area our loved ones are in. I think its partly due to the fact that the news has stated one too many times that Tal Afar is a model of how things are suppose to be and how they have relative calm there and in part to the fact that our government chose to announce that they were going to crackdown on Baghdad and gave the insurgents plenty of time to flee and start wreaking havoc in other areas. My brother is in Co H 121st and all we can do now is pray for them, and all the other soldiers there and hope that God watches over them so they can all return safely home to us. Thank you CO H and thank you for these stories so that we can have a little insight into what its like there for them. GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!!!!