Speaking of al-Qaeda's bloody nose up north, here's some equally valuable info that was contained in this link on the recent fighting in Tal Afar. The standard media narrative is pretty much "US and Iraqi forces hit the city, guerrillas scatter," but the briefing conveys some very interesting information.
For one thing, we get a better idea on why Tal Afar was such an important stronghold for the insurgency to begin with:
First of all, Tall Afar is positioned along routes that lead from Mosul into Syria. So it was important to the enemy to have freedom of action, not only in Tall Afar, but in western Ninevah province, so they could access sources of external support in Syria. Also, this area is important to the enemy because this enemy -- al Qaeda in Iraq -- wants to foment ethnic and sectarian violence and wants a chaotic environment so that they can operate freely in this area, and ultimately what they hope is that Iraq will fail and descend into civil war. And this area is conducive to those sort of efforts because you have an ethnic minority here: the Turkmen. You have - that - ethnic minority is further divided between a majority of Turkmen Sunna and a minority of Turkmen Shi'ia. And this city of Turkmen exists in an area that also includes other ethnic and sectarian groups, including Sunni Arabs and Izedis, and then also Kurds in the region.
So the enemy moved into here to establish this support base and safe haven. They also moved into this area because there's very dense urban terrain in the city of Tall Afar. It's difficult for our forces, organized as we are as a mechanized force, primarily, to access these areas. And so the enemy went into this safe haven and used it not only to access sources of external support, but they also used this area to train, organize, and equip their forces for employment not only locally here in Tall Afar, but without (sic) the region and potentially throughout the country. So it was very important for us to deny the enemy the ability to use this safe haven and to terrorize this population.
Note the reference to external support in Syria.
As well as how al-Qaeda was treating the locals:
This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities. To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.
Now I have no real doubt this is true, but keep in mind that most of the imams that al-Qaeda yanked were in all likelihood Sunni Turkmen. I haven't really touched on the fact that there's a good deal of fair weather anti-clericalism in al-Qaeda on the grounds that the clergy have sold out to the corrupt autocrats of the Middle East and that the traditional Islam practiced by many Sunnis is in fact a post-Mohammed abherration that has to be replaced in favor of Wahhabism, but this might be something that Sunni clerical groups like the Iraqi Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami might seriously want to consider the next time they contemplate throwing in with Zarqawi.
We also get a much better idea what all of those al-Qaeda threats about using chemical weapons and Zarqawi's claim that the US were actually referring to:
In terms of specialized weapons, some crude attempts, I think, in the western part of the city. We've been able to put this picture together now. The enemy had rigged a lot of buildings for destruction, and they wanted to time the destruction of these buildings with the entry of our forces. In one of these buildings the enemy had big barrels of chemicals that had explosives implanted in the chemicals, wires running around, and the whole house was rigged for demolition.
Around this house a lot of families were living. Our soldiers were conducting an area reconnaissance operation. They went into this house. Immediately their eyes began burning, their throat began burning, so they withdrew out of the house immediately and then we conducted reconnaissance with some chemical protective gear and with a remote reconnaissance capability into the house and we could tell that the thing was rigged with chemicals.
We stopped all of our operations. We were actually pursuing a particular enemy, but this was more important. We evacuated the civilians from the area and then we demolished that building without a hazard to the people.
I don't know if you've been following some of the enemy's propaganda. You know, one of the cells in this enemy's structure here, this very well developed enemy structure, is a propaganda cell. And on the sort of jihadist and extremist websites, they've been saying, you know, that coalition forces are using chemical weapons. I think what they had hoped to do was detonate this building, kill innocent civilians in this neighborhood and then blame it on coalition forces. But we preempted their ability to do that by evacuating the civilians from that building. That's one example of it.
We found some manuals that describe how they could make sort of these kind of chemical dirty bombs and so forth. But, you know, if the enemy had the capability to use it, I mean, this enemy is absolutely unscrupulous and I have no doubt that they would use it against innocent civilians and armed forces. So all the more important reason to make sure they don't have a place to develop these kind of plans, to conduct this kind of training. And that's, I think, one of the greatest success of this operation, is the safe haven is gone for them.
As with the previous post, this actually serves to put a lot of the recent insurgent claims and threats in some kind of a context rather than just reporting what they scribble online, which is why I really wish it'd be reported better. I mean, I did this in a couple of minutes and I'm not even being paid for it.
Colonel McMaster also notes that a lot of Saddam's old warrant officers are in league with Zarqawi, once again confirming what I've said about how several Baathists are now so closely aligned and integrated with al-Qaeda in Iraq that it's almost impossible to differentiate between the two.
Why do the leftists of the west kiss up to these islamist barbarians? Why does the "compassionate left" side with those who bomb schools, hospitals, and mosques deliberately to kill civilians? There is no collateral damage with islamist barbarians. There is only intentional murder. They are like Saddam. Did you see the film of the islamists using poison gas on the young dog? Very effective killing juice. They hope to use it on Shiites and infidels soon. Leftists cheer them on.