Tall Afar, Iraq – A joint U.S.-Iraqi force punched deep into Tall Afar, a key insurgent staging ground near the Syrian border, and the Iraqi army said Thursday that it arrested 200 suspected militants in the sweep – three-fourths of them foreign fighters.
Most of the estimated civilian population of 200,000 have now fled this predominantly Turk city, where 70 percent of that ethnic group is Sunni Muslim – the sect that dominates the Iraqi insurgency.
The U.S. military killed seven insurgents over the past two days amid growing indications the joint force was preparing to intensify the operation.
The sweep in Tall Afar came as election officials tallied figures from three Sunni-dominated provinces, where voter registration was extended a week in preparation for the Oct. 15 nationwide referendum on the new constitution.
“Turnout was unbelievable, and people were very enthusiastic, especially in Fallujah and Ramadi,” said Farid Ayar, an electoral commission spokesman in Baghdad.
Those cities are Sunni-insurgent bastions in Anbar province, which stretches west from Baghdad to the Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi borders.
The large voter signup suggests minority Sunnis are mobilizing to defeat the draft charter, a marked tactical shift from January, when their boycott of the parliamentary election handed control of the 275-member National Assembly to Shiites and Kurds.
The new basic law was approved and sent to voters by a coalition of Shiites and Kurds, over the objections of Sunni representatives, who fear it would allow the country to split into sectarian and ethnic mini-states. That could cut Sunnis out of Iraq’s enormous oil wealth.
The same Sunni clerics who railed in January against an election “under foreign military occupation” are now urging their people to take part in both the referendum and the parliamentary balloting in December.
Rejection of the charter would mean elections in December for a new parliament under the rules of the interim constitution approved in March 2004.
