Tall Afar, or Tal Afar or Tal’Afar, depending which English spelling you prefer, is a clear success story for the coalition. I first blogged Tall Afar in January, pondering why the mainstream media was ignoring the good news coming out of Iraq.
Here we are, only two months later and I’m shocked but pleased to report that someone, somewhere was listening. I don’t know if they listened to me, or someone else in the blogsphere, but I’m glad I was able to play a role in getting this story out, even if it wasn’t pivotal.
The media was literally handed this story! Why it took two months to follow up is a mystery, but I’m glad it’s being told. When the mainstream media finally decided to use their massive resources to tell the story of Tal’Afar, some incredibly important quotes resulted. The true nature of this war is clearly revealed in the 60 Minutes piece on Tal Afar: Al-Qaeda’s Town:
“They had schools for snipers. They had kidnapping and murder classes that were attended by people on the best techniques,” says McMaster.
The colonel says he was surprised to learn the enemy in Tal Afar was so organized. “You had this blending of former military expertise and organizational ability with, with a radical Islamic ideology, and it was fertile ground here.”
Col. McMaster is a soldier-scholar, known for writing a book that found fault with military and political leaders during the Vietnam War. As commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry, he was given the mission to recapture Tal Afar. He told 60 Minutes that to defeat an insurgency, you have to win the trust of the people.
“The enemy showed the people who they really are. These are mass murderers. These are people who don’t have respect human life,” says McMaster. “These are people who want to choke the life out of cities like Tal Afar.”
Beheading people and leaving their corpses in the streets. Killing a child and hiding explosives inside his body as a technique for killing the father because they knew he would claim the body. The lowest and vilest acts imaginable from merchants of ideological despair. Tal’Afar was controlled by desperate death peddlars and vagabond scum.
Imagine your home town with decapitated bodies being put on display in the streets. Imagine thugs snatching your kids off the streets to use as pawns in a murderous game. Imagine houses taken over and dedicated to torturing and murdering families of anyone who disagrees with the villains who have taken over. Ignoring Islamofascists or downplaying the spread of their memes is an invitation for them to grow their ministry of destruction and blind hatred. Like certain types of rodents and insects, Islamofascists hide in dark places and breed. The U.S. Army acted as the Orkin Man in Tal’Afar and Iraqis who live there acknowledge this fact. This is an important and possibly even pivotal story in the larger and ongoing history of this war.
Stories of hope are the ones we need most. The people bringing hope to Iraq are not part of the insurgency; they are not the purveyors of the revenge killings and sectarian murders. They aren’t the people sneaking across the border from neighboring countries bent on keeping Iraq in turmoil and scared of what seeds of freedom that have been planted here might grow into one day.
What sort of hope does Al-Qaeda have to offer? False promises of eternal reward for murdering school children? Cunning men have always taken advantage of the gullible. The only long-term question that worries me is whether Al-Qaeda’s leadership, working with the governments of Syria and Iran will be able to continue manipulating a gullible American public into thinking that we should just give up in the Middle East. If the Zarqawi’s of the world can convince us to substitute small tragedies on a personal scale for a much larger one on a worldwide scale, then they will win.
The New York Post ran a mostly positive Tal’Afar story recently, but they require registration to read it, and I don’t play the content/spam exchange game. What the mayor had to say, however, is incredibly important. “Before their sacrifices, the smiles were stolen from our children’s faces. With their sacrifices, they have given us life and hope and the smiles of the children,†he said. He wants Americans to know that progress in Iraq is happening, and that his town, at least, is grateful.
This completely debunks the lies and inneundo being spread by the mean-spirited and short-sighted whiners over at the Daily Kos, which I commented about recently. I was taught that if you have nothing productive to contribute to a situation, you should keep your mouth shut, and that’s my advice to those folks right now.