Tal Afar: Al Qaeda's Town

Lara Logan Reports On Battle To Retake Iraqi Town

(CBS) 

Al Qaeda used Tal Afar as a staging area for fighters arriving from Syria to launch attacks in the rest of Iraq.

"Anybody and anything could just move right through the one legal border crossing here," says Col. McMaster.

"But that was two years into the war. Where was the U.S. presence?" asks Logan.

"The border was secured to some degree, you know," Col. McMaster says.

"It sounds like there weren’t enough U.S. forces on the ground to secure that border," Logan responds.

"Yeah, I think that's clear," the colonel replies.

U.S. forces drove the terrorists out of Tal Afar in 2004, but they left too few troops behind to hold the city. Al Qaeda came flooding back and took revenge on anyone who had helped the Americans. Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that al Qaeda's strategy was to incite civil war within Tal Afar's biggest ethnic group, the Turkomen, by using violence to turn Turkomen Sunnis against Turkomen Shiites.

When Time Magazine's Ware met up with McMaster's forces in August 2005, Tal Afar was so dangerous that the soldiers had to run for cover the moment their boots hit the ground.

Pictures filmed by Ware showed U.S. forces running the moment they left their armored vehicles. "It was the only way to survive in that city," he explains. "You couldn’t even sit inside your tank without being shot."

McMaster expected the bloodiest battle in a neighborhood of the city called Sarai, where al Qaeda had its headquarters. To help his cavalry troops, he was relying on thousands of Iraqi infantry led by U.S. Special Forces.

"The troops I were with were what you would loosely describe as the tip of the spear. They were the men selected to go into the worst of the worst. They were to drive the stake into the dark heart of the al Qaeda stronghold," says Ware.

On the morning of September 3, 2005, the attack began.

For the first three days, they fought through the city street by street. Whenever possible, they used the rooftops, to avoid booby traps al Qaeda fighters had planted to slow them down.

Frightened families were ordered out of their homes, as explosions echoed around them. Those who couldn't walk were carried. There were children clutching white flags.

By the third day of fighting, the Iraqi and American soldiers were in place to make the final assault on al Qaeda's stronghold. They were taking fire from a nearby building, so American Green Berets called in an air strike.

"We had rounds cracking literally around our heads," recalls Ware. "The bullets were whizzing in front of me and behind me."

As the fighting continued, the troops were anxious to advance, but they had orders to hold their positions and wait two days for more civilians to get out.

Then something happened that Col. McMaster had not planned for: Politicians in Baghdad forced a delay of three more days, apparently concerned about civilian casualties.

Ware says to the soldiers, he was with it looked like the delay gave al Qaeda time to escape.

"The al Qaeda presence in Tal Afar was surrounded. And the attack was primed. And then it was stopped dead in its tracks. And so, as the troops I was with battled throughout the day and into the night with al Qaeda fighters so close you could throw a stone and hit them, when we woke up the next morning — poof — they were gone!" says Ware.