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The battle rages, fierce and bloody, perhaps the heaviest fighting northern Iraq has seen so far in this war. U.S. special forces are here, along with their Kurdish allies, facing down Ansar al-Islam, the diehard terrorist group based in Kurdish-controlled Iraq that the Americans believe is linked to al-Qaeda. "There are three or four isolated pockets of Ansar on very high ground. We're closing in on them from everywhere we can," says an American commando named Mark, who declined to give his rank or surname. All Saturday afternoon the Ansar fighters rain down sniper and machine-gun fire from a craggy peak high above the Americans. From the flat plains about two miles below, pro-American Kurds return artillery fire.
Positioned on a mountainside in between, the Americans unleash their own barrage. During four hours of battle, I saw U.S. forces drill Ansar with mortars, heavy machine-gun and antiaircraft artillery, 40-mm grenades and 500-lb. bombs dropped from planes overhead. Still, the fire was returned by an enemy clearly visible through binoculars. At one stage an Ansar defender screamed, "God is Great," even as grenades and heavy rounds peppered the cave he had ducked into.
Special-forces marksmen joined the battle. Three of them took positions behind a rock, patiently waiting to sight their Ansar counterparts far above. "There's a sniper playing with us," said one. The Americans' high-powered rifles cracked intermittently. When the incoming rounds finally ceased, the American snipers picked themselves up. "I think between us we smoked three guys, sir," one said. "Oh, at least," said another.
It was the latest in a running battle waged since Ansar had been driven from its front line in the lowlands. A day earlier, about 100 U.S. soldiers had joined with Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death) in an assault against Ansar's base. The U.S. bombs flattened a mosque in the village of Biarra that had been used as terrorist headquarters, replete with a gun pit on top. The assault capped a week of pummeling by American Tomahawk cruise missiles that prompted the al-Qaeda-linked militants to take to the snowy mountains bordering Iran. This corner of northeastern Iraq, near the town of Halabja, is rough territory, a no-man's-land of escape routes and caves impervious to all but the mightiest bombing.
The assault clearly took a toll on Ansar's militants. Politburo member Mahmood Sangarwi of the pro-American Patriotic Union of Kurdistan says 60 dead were left behind after Friday's battles. In the rocky terrain of Saturday's exchange I saw eight more slain Ansar fighters. Some had died in their bunkers; others were cut down as they fled over open ground or among relatively exposed rocky outcrops. Their corpses remained where they had fallen throughout the assault.