New find in 'smoking gun' search

Mortars and doshkas - old-fashioned Russian mounted machine guns - could be heard rumbling from the other side of the mountain, where Kurdish fighters say there are still "cleaning up the area." The Ansar camp itself could have been hit by a tornado. Buildings were reduced to rubble, while Islamist newspapers and magazines in Kurdish and Arabic lay scattered near a crater from US aerial bombardment. A ransacked building included a room full of mortars, and nearby some gloves and surgical masks, had Allahu Akbar, or "God is great" written on the door. In one ditch lay a large pile of empty canisters marked as baby formula. Their presence in the camp led to speculation here that they could have been used to smuggle chemical weapons materials.

The US and its Kurdish allies came at the camp from five different directions and worked in color-coded teams of red, green, and yellow - the Kurdish national colors.

Tuesday, officers referred to the pesh merga, Kurdish for "those who face death," as the "Pesh," and both counted Ansar's routing as an important victory for future cooperation in the war.

A relative affluence that many in Kurdish autonomous areas have come to enjoy in recent years under the oil-for-food program has been kept far from villagers here, who could not be reached by charity organizations because of their militant guests. The Ansar fighters also mined the area around the village to protect themselves from any invasion, Kurdish officials say.

"Now the people of this area face great dangers," says Skeikh Jaffar Mustafa, the commander of Halabjah.

Although US Special Forces officers said that only about 1 percent of the forces involved were American - anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 pesh merga forces were involved in the assault - Mr. Mustafa says the offensive would not have been possible without US aerial attacks.

"The American special forces were a great support to us," he says.

The operation was a Kurdish initiative in which the US had a joint interest, the Special Forces officers said. Together they inflicted damage that would be a major setback for Ansar.

"There always a threat from a terrorist organization, but we've pretty much eliminated their base of operations here. So it will be very difficult for them to plan for future missions," said a Special Forces company commander who spoke to reporters in Halabjah.

"In a period of a day and a half, a terrorist organization which had a grip on this region for the last several years was routed out and neutralized."

Maj. Tim Nye, a spokesman for the Special Forces, says he thinks that the number of Ansar and Al Qaeda fighters who simply escaped away from the US and Kurdish attack was limited.

"Did a couple of guys get up over those mountains? I would say so," Major Nye says. "Did a lot of them get up over those mountains? I wouldn't think so."

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