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Blasts from past in north
For two days, Iraqi troops in this small industrial town 24 miles from the oil-rich city of Mosul had alternated between taking shelter when American bombers were overhead and lobbing artillery when the skies were clear. Khazer - and the nearby two-lane steel bridge over a tributary of the Zab River - have become a battlefield because they are the last major obstacle on the road to Mosul. On Friday, the Special Forces and their 400 Kurdish allies took the bridge leading into Khazer. Late Saturday, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the Iraqis retook the bridge. The bizarre battle has see-sawed back and forth over the last week, as the Iraqis slowly retreated in the face of heavy U.S. bombing, only to resume heavy mortar and artillery fire when the planes departed. But coalition fighters have lacked the punch to rout the 2,000 Iraqis on nearby ridges and take the town. The aerial assault picked up yesterday as the bombing of the ridges beyond the town intensified and jets swooped down to strafe. "We had a good night's sleep for once," said one U.S. Special Forces soldier. Then the shelling began again. The Kurds and Americans retreated to the hills, leaving Iraqi dead sprawled near the bridge. "The northern front is active and working," said Hoshyar Zebari, the head of international relations for the Kurdish party controlling this part of Iraq. Kurdish commanders said the daily bombardment is an attempt to force the Iraqis to surrender or abandon their posts. In three days of fighting at Khazer, the Americans and Kurds had suffered a single casualty when a Kurdish fighter was injured by an Iraqi shell, said Sarbest Babiri, the front-line commander. A campaign resembling the Northern Alliance tactics in Afghanistan is not what American military planners envisioned before the war. They expected Turkey would allow the U.S. to ferry the 4th Infantry Division and its powerful fleet of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to sweep down from Turkey and threaten Baghdad from the north. Those plans died when Turkey refused to cooperate. Instead, the U.S. has dropped in 2,000 members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, a lightly armed unit that has prepared two runways for the delivery of equipment and possibly additional troops. In a possible sign of escalation yesterday, at least 25 trucks carried members of the 173rd Airborne toward the fighting, but stopped less than 10 miles from the front. Working with Americans American troops are expected to continue to arrive in northern Iraq, and eventually include armor, said Zebari. He said he did not expect there would ever be enough Americans so that they would not need their Kurdish allies. The Kurds - mindful of Turkey's fears that they will declare independence in the aftermath of the war - are at pains to show they are part of the coalition and working with the Americans, and that they will not try to seize Mosul and another oil-rich city, Kirkuk. "We're Iraqi," said Wajeh Barzani, a top Kurdish military leader. "We live in the whole of Iraq. We're not going to split this country." "You will not see any unilateral move of the Kurdish forces independent of the U.S. forces," said Zebari. |