Tal Afar After Liberation From ISIS: Battered but Still Standing
An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were leveled. But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State terrorist group, which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three […]Rukmini Callimachi writes for The New York Times:
An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were leveled.
But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State terrorist group, which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three years of occupation, that was good news.
The majority of Tal Afar’s structures are still standing, even if many have been defaced. Compared with the wholesale destruction in the battle to retake Mosul, where the worst-hit neighborhoods resemble the landscape after a 7.0-magnitude quake, the smaller city to the north is largely intact — even if it may still take months to repair the scarred masonry, cover up craters and sweep aside the detritus left by Islamic State fighters, including their graffiti of death.
