Eight other people were wounded in the attacks in the town of Tal Afar, they added.
"The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight, " the president said.
One of the Iraqi soldiers who fought in TAL Afar was a private named Tarek Hazem.
McMaster, commander of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry, which is responsible for security in Tal Afar, told CNN.
Tal Afar is located about 150km (90 miles) east of the Syrian border and 420km north-west of Baghdad.
"The example of Tal Afar gives me confidence in our strategy, " he said.
He pointed to success in pacifying an insurgent stronghold in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border.
McMaster said he believes recent arrests in Tal Afar and at the Syrian border have significantly disrupted the insurgency's ability to operate.
And because of the skill and courage of the Iraqi forces, the citizens of TAL Afar were able to vote in October's constitutional referendum.
Soldiers have been moving earth to construct a trench and a berm around Tal Afar, forcing traffic to go through rather than around security checkpoints.
Iraqis now have a small Air Force, that recently conducted its first combat airlift operations bringing Iraqi troops to the front in TAL Afar.
The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year's assault in Fallujah.
The head of Iraq's intelligence academy and two bodyguards have been killed in a suicide blast in the northern town of Tal Afar, police say.
One Task Force Lightning soldier died and another soldier was injured in the incident, which occurred in Nineveh province, where Mosul and Tal Afar are located.
Yesterday I spoke about an important example of the gains we and the Iraqis have made, and that is in the northern city of Tal Afar.
In the few places where the principles of counter-insurgency had been put into practice as they had in Tal Afar, in 2005, by a gutsy colonel named H.
As we mark the third anniversary of the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the success we're seeing in Tal Afar gives me confidence in the future of Iraq.
The mistake was that, you know, we left Tal Afar to its own devices, and it's not surprising that they had the opportunity to get back in there.
Insurgents killed nearly 200 Iraqis in a series of attacks on Wednesday and Thursday in response to a joint American-Iraqi attack on a militant stronghold in Tal Afar.
But there's a lot of positive foundation in Tal Afar in my view and it would not take much to get that thing back on the right course again.
But look, Tal Afar was an area that we had secured - we have secured the population and we changed the level of violence rather dramatically, we enfranchised the local leadership.
Just a year ago, Tal Afar, the city up near the Syrian border in the northwestern part of the country, was cited as an example of this is how we should do it.
It was in the northern town of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, that American and Iraqi army units recently attacked Sunni insurgents, claiming to have killed 157 of them and capturing 440 more.
Also on Monday, three people died and nearly three dozen were wounded in the nearby city of Tal Afar when a suicide attacker blew himself up at an Iraqi soldier's funeral, the U.S. military reported.
The group said it wanted Sunni women released from Interior Ministry prisons and handovers of officers who committed a notorious rape as well as officers who participated in displacing people and raping women in Tal Afar.
CNN: Video claims to show Iraq security officers' executions
David Rodriguez of the U.S. Army's Task Force Freedom said he was discussing with Iraqi leaders how best to handle the continuing violence in Tal Afar, where parts of the city are still controlled by insurgents.
Many of the people outside the administration who have been most prominent in proposing this have been people like General Jack Keane, a recently retired general, and a lot of people who are active in Tal Afar, which is a place where the clear hold-and-build strategy actually worked.
MOSUL, Iraq (CNN) -- As U.S. soldiers construct a wall around the troubled city of Tal Afar to keep out fighters and weapons, residents are fleeing in fear of an imminent military attack by American and Iraqi forces against insurgents still in the city, according to a senior military commander.
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