Text 16821, 195 rader
Skriven 2005-12-28 09:50:48 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: Iraq News
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Kurds in Iraqi army proclaim loyalty to militia

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their
militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the
groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly
half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an
independent Kurdistan.

Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region
suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American
troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction.
Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national
command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious
interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is
inevitable.

The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still
considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish militia - and
were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they
wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a
fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

"It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion,"
said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was
escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours."

The Kurds have readied their troops not only because they've long yearned
to establish an independent state but also because their leaders expect
Iraq to disintegrate, senior leaders in the Peshmerga - literally, "those
who face death" - told Knight Ridder. The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni
Muslims, and are ethnically distinct from Arabs.

Their strategy mirrors that of Shiite Muslim parties in southern Iraq,
which have stocked Iraqi army and police units with members of their own
militias and have maintained a separate militia presence throughout Iraq's
central and southern provinces. The militias now are illegal under Iraqi
law but operate openly in many areas. Peshmerga leaders said in interviews
that they expected the Shiites to create a semi-autonomous and then
independent state in the south as they would do in the north.

The Bush administration - and Iraq's neighbors - oppose the nation's
fragmentation, fearing that it could lead to regional collapse. To keep
Iraq together, U.S. plans to withdraw significant numbers of American
troops in 2006 will depend on turning U.S.-trained Kurdish and Shiite
militiamen into a national army.

The interviews with Kurdish troops, however, suggested that as the American
military transfers more bases and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may
be handing the nation to militias that are bent more on advancing ethnic
and religious interests than on defeating the insurgency and preserving
national unity.

A U.S. military officer in Baghdad with knowledge of Iraqi army operations
said he was frustrated to hear of the Iraqi soldiers' comments but that he
had seen no reports suggesting that they would acted improperly in the
field.

"There's talk and there's acts, and their actions are that they follow the
orders of the Iraqi chain of command and they secure their sectors well,"
said the officer, who refused to be identified because he's not authorized
to speak on the subject

American military officials have said they're trying to get a broader mix
of sects in the Iraqi units.

However, Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi army on the edge of
Kirkuk, said he would resist any attempts to dilute the Kurdish presence in
his brigade.

"The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab soldiers from the
south," Naji said. "After two weeks of service, we sent them away. We did
not accept them. We will not let them carry through with their plans to
bring more Arab soldiers here."

One key to the Kurds' plan for independence is securing control of Kirkuk,
the seat of a province that holds some of Iraq's largest oil fields. Should
the Kurds push for independence, Kirkuk and its oil would be a key economic
engine.

The city's Kurdish population was driven out by former Sunni Arab dictator
Saddam Hussein, whose "Arabization" program paid thousands of Arab families
to move there and replace recently deported or murdered Kurds.

"Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs," Hamid Afandi, the
minister of Peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two
major Kurdish groups, said in an interview at his office in the Kurdish
city of Irbil. "If we can resolve this by talking, fine, but if not, then
we will resolve it by fighting."

In addition to putting former Peshmerga in the Iraqi army, the Kurds have
deployed small Peshmerga units in buildings and compounds throughout
northern Iraq, according to militia leaders. While it's hard to calculate
the number of these active Peshmerga fighters, interviews with militia
members suggest that it's well in excess of 10,000.

Afandi said his group had sent at least 10,000 Peshmerga to the Iraqi army
in northern Iraq, a figure substantiated in interviews with officers in two
Iraqi army divisions in the region.

"All of them belong to the central government, but inside they are Kurds
... all Peshmerga are under the orders of our leadership," Afandi said.

Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal
Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, a longtime rival of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, echoed that.

"We will do our best diplomatically, and if that fails we will use force"
to secure borders for an independent Kurdistan, Mustafir said. "The
government in Baghdad will be too weak to use force against the will of the
Kurdish people."

Mustafir said his party had sent at least 4,000 Peshmerga of its own into
the Iraqi army in the area.

The Kurds have positioned their men in Iraqi army units on the western
flank of Kirkuk, in the area that includes Irbil and the volatile city of
Mosul, and on the eastern flank in the area that includes the Kurdish city
of Sulaimaniyah.

The Iraqi army's 2nd Division, which oversees the Irbil-Mosul area, has
some 12,000 soldiers, and at least 90 percent of them are Kurds, according
to the division's executive officer.

Of the 3,000 Iraqi soldiers in Irbil, some 2,500 were together in a
Peshmerga unit previously based in the city. An entire brigade in Mosul,
about 3,000 soldiers, is composed of three battalions that were transferred
almost intact from former Peshmerga units, with many of the same soldiers
and officers in the same positions. Mosul's population is split between
Kurds and Arabs, and any move by Peshmerga units to take it almost
certainly would lead to an eruption of Arab violence.

"The Parliament must solve the issue of Kurdistan. If not, we know how to
deal with this: We will send Kurdish forces to enforce Kurdistan's
boundaries, and that will have to include the newly liberated areas such as
the Kurdish sections of Mosul," 1st Lt. Herish Namiq said. "Every single
one of us is Peshmerga. Our entire battalion is Peshmerga."

Namiq was riding in an unarmored pickup in an Arab neighborhood in eastern
Mosul where Sunni Arab insurgents frequently shoot at his men. As he leaned
out the window with his AK-47, scanning the streets, he said, "We will do
our duty as Peshmerga."

Firas Ahmed, the assistant to the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party
office in Mosul, invited a Knight Ridder reporter to inspect the local
Peshmerga brigade, motioning to a compound across the street.

It housed the headquarters of the 4th Brigade of the Iraqi army's 2nd
Division.

"We cannot openly say they are Peshmerga," Ahmed said. "We will take you to
see the Peshmerga, but they will be wearing Iraqi army uniforms."

Ahmed's boss, Khasrow Kuran, grinned and chimed in: "We cannot say
`Peshmerga' here."

The 4th Brigade soldiers who met Ahmed at the front gate saluted him and
said, openly, that they reported to Afandi, the Kurdistan Democratic
Party's Peshmerga commander.

Col. Sabar Saleem, a former Peshmerga who's the head intelligence officer
for the 4th Brigade, said he answered to the Peshmerga leadership. He also
said he had little use for most Sunni Arabs.

"All of the Sunnis are facilitating the terrorists. They have little
influence compared with the Kurds and Shiites, so they allow the terrorists
to operate to create pressure and get political concessions," Saleem said.
"So they should be killed, too ... the Sunni political leaders in Baghdad
are supporting the insurgency, too, and there will be a day when they are
tried for it."

To the east, in the Iraqi army's 4th Division, is a brigade of about 3,000
troops in Sulaimaniyah that's also a near-replica of a former Peshmerga
brigade.

Because of a U.S. military mandate, the 4th Division battalion serving in
Kirkuk is about 50 percent Kurdish, 40 percent Arab and 10 percent Turkmen.
The battalion on the outskirts of Kirkuk is about 60 percent Kurdish.

Capt. Fakhir Mohammed, a former Peshmerga and the operations officer for
the battalion on Kirkuk's edge, said he wasn't concerned that the Kurds had
only a simple majority in the two Kirkuk battalions: "It's not a problem,
because we have an entire brigade in Sulaimaniyah that is all Kurd. They
would come down here and take the Kurdish side."

Sgt. Ahmed Abdullah agreed.

"There are thousands of us Peshmerga, and it is our duty to protect the
borders of Kurdistan ... we will fight to hold Kirkuk at any price,"
Abdullah said. "We will fight that battalion (in Kirkuk) if they stand in
our way." 
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