Soldiers' Angel - Holly Aho

Michelle Malkin points out a 60 Minutes story that ran last night highlighting US success and victory in Tal Afar Iraq. From the article (which is long but worth the entire read):

This is a story about an entire city that was taken over by al Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people who live there became prisoners in their own homes when terrorists took control and turned it into their town.

They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and as Lara Logan reports, the Bush administration is pointing to that operation as a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war.

The faces of evil, that can't be excused or reasoned with...

"Al Qaeda in Iraq had a very sophisticated strategy for taking over the city," says Colonel H.R. McMaster...

..."They fired mortars indiscriminately into playgrounds, into school yards, across the marketplace to kill innocent civilians. What they really wanted to do was incite fear," explains McMaster,

Asked what life was like for the inhabitants of Tal Afar, McMaster says, "Life was horrible in the city. They would leave headless bodies in the street. They kidnapped a young child on one occasion, killed the child, put a booby trap inside of his body and waited for the father to come claim the body to kill the parent."

Masked gunmen led by al Qaeda roamed the streets of Tal Afar at will, publicly executing and kidnapping people.

A picture of before....

"Al Qaeda planted its flag in Tal Afar and said 'This is ours,'" says Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time Magazine.

Ware was able to take pictures of the city while it was still under terrorist control last summer. The video, which 60 Minutes bought from him, shows Tal Afar had become a ghost town, with the streets deserted, shops closed and whole families so afraid that they stayed behind closed doors.

And the look of victory after....

These days, he walks the streets like the pied piper, with crowds of Iraqi children chanting his name. They're the same streets he fought for just a few months ago.

He couldn't do this before the battle of Tal Afar. "No way, at least not without getting into a gunfight," says Capt. Sellars.

Asked what it means to him to see stores reopen in Tal Afar, Sellars says, "It's a sign of success. It's a sign of victory, you know."

In the market with Capt. Sellars, Logan met Akeel Karaja, a Sunni merchant who had just reopened his family shop. He was eager to explain how life in Tal Afar had improved.

Karaja says under al Qaeda he would not have been able to talk to Logan. Asked what would have happened to him, he says, "They would have cut my head. Beheaded me."

Go read the whole thing.