most of the insurgents were Sunni Arab and the vast majority of the recruits to the Iraqi security forces came from the Shia regions of the southern Iraq. Al-Anbar province, the westernmost and largest province of Iraq (containing the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi) was where the largest amount of combat continued to take place, with U.S. soldiers routinely suffering casualties in military operations against insurgents. At the same time, the insurgency within al-Anbar was increasingly being dominated by the Islamist insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. Militants from the group had increasingly been asserting control over the major cities and towns of the province. Tribal leaders and former Ba'athists, who had previously led the fight against American troops, unsuccessfully resisted this takeover for a short time during the fall of 2005. Elsewhere in Iraq, especially in the Kurdish north and Shi'a south, violence was not as intense. On September 10, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, backed by Coalition forces, assaulted Tal Afar in search of suspected Sunni Arab insurgents. The U.S. military and the Iraqi government asserted that the town had turned into an important way station for the Sunni insurgency, particularly al-Qaeda in Iraq. Tal Afar had been reported as a conduit for equipment and local fighters smuggled in from Syria. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari ordered Iraqi forces to commence the operation to remove all insurgent elements. The operation was later declared successful at removing the city from the control of Sunni insurgents. During the fall of 2005, insurgents, suspected to be mostly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq launched a new round of massive suicide bombings against Shi'a populations, declaring an all-out war on the Shi'a majority. Hundreds of Shi'a workers, soldiers, and civilians were killed in several of these individual strikes. Shi'a anger was quelled by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who forbade revenge attacks and kept the Shi'a populace in line and in support of the government. New Iraqi elections and the threat of civil war When the elections for parliament occurred on December 15, 2005, insurgents pledged not to disrupt them, and the day passed peacefully. Until the New Year of 2006, few major attacks occurred on either U.S. soldiers or on Iraqi civilians and troops. The insurgency remained quiet, launching small-scale bomb attacks that were, in comparison to the hundreds of dead in suicide attacks during the fall, relatively minor affairs. Aftermath On February 22, 2006,