The U.S. military launched a major pre-dawn assault Sunday to wrest the northern city of Tall Afar from insurgents but encountered almost no resistance, leaving uncertain the whereabouts of fighters who have battled U.S.-led forces for months. About 2,000 men -- two battalions from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, and a battalion from the Iraqi National Guard -- pushed into Tall Afar at 3:15 a.m. to confront what U.S. military officials had expected would be about 200 insurgents who had taken over the local government. Instead, the U.S. forces, backed by F-16 fighter jets, encountered only brief fire from small arms, U.S. military officials said. An expected counterattack at dawn, when U.S.-led troops would no longer have the advantage of night-vision equipment, also did not materialize. "We thought there would be more, the indications were that there would be more, but there wasn't," said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. forces involved in the operation. "There's some good news in there, and there's probably some bad news."
Ham said U.S. commanders concluded that some of the insurgents had probably fled in anticipation of the attack. Others, he said, probably gave up after being pounded by three U.S. airstrikes after the operation began on Thursday. It continued into Friday morning before a pause in the fighting. "And then, thirdly, there is some indication that perhaps we killed more than we think we did [in] the first couple of operations," Ham said in an interview at Camp Freedom, a U.S. military base set up in a palace that once belonged to Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay. |