US, Iraq Troops Push into Tal Afar as Talabani Welcomes Israeli Investment
10/09/2005| IslamWeb
US and Iraqi troops have swept into Tal Afar, conducting house-to-house searches and battering down walls with armored vehicles in an effort to clean the city of fighters.
In the Tal Afar offensive, expected for weeks, coalition forces initially faced several hundred lightly armed insurgents in the largely deserted city, 420km northwest of Baghdad and about 100km east of the Syrian border.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari issued a statement announcing the start of the offensive.
"At 2am today, acting on my orders, Iraqi forces commenced an operation to remove all remaining terrorist elements from the city of Tel Afar. These forces are operating with support from the Multinational Force," he said.
US forces cleared the city last year but quickly withdrew, leaving behind a force of 500 that was unable to block the fighters’ return.
Residents fled
The US military had carried out repeated air and artillery strikes against the city, where most of the population of 200,000 was reported to have fled to the surrounding countryside.
Tal Afar residents were largely Turkmen with ethnic and cultural ties to Turkey to the north. They are mostly Sunni Muslims but had been governed since the ouster of Saddam Hussein by a US-backed Shia Muslim city government and police force.
Also in Baghdad, five people were killed when a roadside bomb exploded next to a police convoy in the south of the capital. Two paramilitary police officers and 3 civilians in a nearby vehicle died in the blast. Seven officers were wounded, hospital officials said.
Relations with Israel
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said that all US troops could depart Iraq in two years, with the exception of a limited number of its military bases.
The London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper on Saturday reported Talabani's statements to Israeli journalists in which he said Iraq would establish full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state after it accepts the Saudi initiative proposed by King Abdullah at the Arab Summit in Beirut.
Talabani said Iraq harbors no hostility towards Israel.
"Furthermore, the Iraqis do not want to be more Palestinians than the Palestinians themselves," Talabani said, noting that his country is open to Israeli business.
He welcomed any initiative from the Israeli businessmen to open trade with Iraq and offered an invitation to invest in Iraq.
PHOTO CAPTION