Kurds quietly ready for civil war

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KIRKUK, Iraq — Iraq's 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.

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 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 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 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 reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours."

The Kurds have readied their troops because they've long yearned to establish an independent state and because their leaders expect Iraq to disintegrate, said senior leaders in the peshmerga, literally, "those who face death." The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims and are ethnically distinct from Arabs.

Their strategy mirrors that of Shiite Muslim parties in southern Iraq that 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 are illegal under Iraqi law but operate openly in many areas.

Ethnic factions persist

The Defense Department's intelligence agency acknowledges that there are dozens of loosely organized Shiite armies in southern Iraq, Kurdish militias in the north that function as a regular army, and that Sunnis dominate the violent insurgency that includes up to 20,000 fighters in Iraq's four central provinces.

Shiites make up 60 percent of the population and dominate oil-rich areas in the South. Kurds, who represent 17 percent, seek to control the oil resources in the north and have been semiautonomous since the 1991 Persian Gulf War left them protected by U.S. air power. Kurds and Shiites were oppressed under the Sunni-led dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and both oppose a powerful federal government.

"The most important force in Iraq for breaking up the country and preventing a strong central government isn't the insurgency, it's the Kurds, and the second most important force is the Shiites," James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corp., told Bloomberg News recently.

"It's not an Iraqi army," said Leslie Gelb, former assistant secretary of state and former president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, adding that most of the militias pay first allegiance to their ethnic or tribal group.

Gelb, who visited Iraq for 10 days earlier this year, said Kurds are loyal to Kurds, Shiite militias resembling "mafia operations" run the south, "the central region has the insurgency, and Baghdad is all mixed up," he said.

Peshmerga leaders told Knight Ridder they expected the Shiites to create a semiautonomous and then independent state in the south as they would do in the north.

The Bush administration and Iraq's neighbors, including Turkey, which has its own Kurdish insurgency, oppose the nation's fragmentation, fearing it could lead to regional collapse.

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 U.S. military transfers more bases and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to militias bent more on advancing ethnic and religious interests than on defeating the insurgency and preserving national unity.

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 Saddam, whose "Arabization" program paid thousands of Arab families to move there and replace recently deported or slain 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 political groups, said 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."

Afandi said his group had sent at least 10,000 peshmerga to the Iraqi army in northern Iraq. "All of them belong to the central government, but inside they are Kurds ... all peshmerga are under the orders of our leadership," Afandi said.

"We will do our duty"

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."

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. A 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."

Col. Sabar Saleem, 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," he 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."

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."

DUPE!!!

Oh wait, wrong thread.

As long as there are differences in religion, there will always be war. That's the sad fact.

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Quoted: As long as there are differences in religion, there will always be war. That's the sad fact.

Especially in a country like Iraq.  Honestly, I don't see how a "free, representative democracy" can survive there.

Quoted: As long as there are differences in religion, there will always be war. That's the sad fact.

They are all the same religion, diffrent enthnicity. Did you read the article.

There is no reason they can't operate as a semi-autonumus province of Iraq. They want control of Mosul, that too is possible. They can get along, this can be resolved.

I can't blame the Kurds for being wary of Arabs, they have been dealing with their crap for many centuries.

Good Luck Kurds!

Quoted: DUPE!!! Oh wait, wrong thread.

www.jobrelatedstuff.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=422472

The issue with 'Iraq' is that the country needs to figure out it's organization... From an American perspective, it's easy to say there should be 3 'states' (South, central, and north) with an independant 'capital district' around Baghdad...

But to the Iraqis, they can't figure this out completely...

Remember, it took US 2 governments (AOC and Federal) and a civil war to decide on what basis our govt should be arranged....