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U.S.
troops have also continued to fight supporters of
the Hussein regime in the northern city Mosul.
Baathists there launched widespread attacks last
month in an attempt to aid their brothers in
Fallujah. In response, thousands of Kurdish
peshmerga soldiers joined U.S. troops in retaking
police stations that had been overrun by the
Baathists.
The peshmerga—the name means literally “those ready
to die”—are military units founded in 1946 by Iraqi
Kurd leader Mustafa Barzani to help defend the
independent Kurdish Mahabad Republic founded in
neighboring Iran at the time. Today, they reportedly
number as many as 55,000 members.
The peshmerga are now collaborating with the U.S.
military to defeat Baathist forces in Mosul. Kurds
there had been historically discriminated against or
driven out of their homes under the Hussein regime.
“I cannot say that Mosul has been cleansed,” said
Iraqi Maj. Gen. Rashid Flaih, who heads a 500-strong
commando force sent to help U.S. troops crush
Baathist militias in the city. At least 50 people
have been killed in 10 days reported the November 28
Scotsman. Most of those have been member of the
Iraqi police and National Guard.
Many of those killed, reportedly by single gunshots
in the head or by beheadings, are Kurds. This has
made the Kurdish soldiers there more determined to
fight and perhaps carve out a part of the oil-rich
city as part of a semi-autonomous Kurdish area in a
federated Iraq.
“We are here to defend our people. We will fight and
we will fight to win,” Sadi Ahmed Pire, commander of
a Kurdish peshmerga battalion, recently told his
troops gathered on the bank of the Tigris River just
across from the Sunni Arab-dominated section of
Mosul. “The Kurds of Mosul will not be second-class
citizens,” he said, according to the Boston Globe.
On November 25 security officials of the Iraqi
interim government announced the capture of Abu
Saeed, reportedly a top aide to al-Zarqawi,
according to the London Guardian. Saeed was captured
during fighting in Mosul, where the U.S. military
said it also discovered large caches of weapons
including antiaircraft guns, artillery rockets, and
thousands of grenades, mortars and small arms.
Meanwhile, during raids in the “Triangle of Death”
south of Baghdad, U.S., British, and Iraqi troops
have reportedly captured more than 200 Baathists in
the first week of the offensive there.
Despite the intensified fighting in the Sunni
Triangle, the northern areas around Mosul and Kirkuk,
and the areas near the Iraqi-Syrian border, much of
Iraq remains calm. One indication of this is ongoing
progress in oil production.
The November 29 Wall Street Journal reported that
despite frequent sabotage attacks Iraq’s oil
industry “pumps away.” The International Energy
Agency in Paris, the Journal said, estimates that
Iraq pumped an average of about 2 million barrels of
oil a day in the second and third quarters of this
year. That output is about 20 percent short of the
country’s oil production before the 2003 invasion.
Taking positions on Iraqi elections
Under the unfolding U.S.-led onslaught against the
Baathists, most political forces in Iraq have lined
up behind the call for national elections as soon as
possible.
The Dawa party and the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the main Shia
parties dominating the interim government, have
rejected a demand by Sunni-led parties to postpone
elections for six months due to fighting in the
Sunni Triangle. In a joint statement with 40 other
Shia-led parties, Dawa and SCIRI said the elections
will proceed as scheduled on January 30. U.S.
president George Bush and U.S. ambassador to Iraq
John Negroponte have also said they hoped the
elections will proceed as scheduled.
Adnan Pachachi, who served as Iraq’s foreign
minister before the interim government was
installed, said that more than a dozen political
parties, including representatives of the two main
Kurdish parties, met at his home and issued a
statement supporting a postponement of the
elections. “If you rush the elections, there will be
some boycott,” Pachachi warned.
The main Kurdish political groups, however, soon
shifted position and aligned themselves with the
Shiite groups on the elections.
A senior Kurdish official who is part of the interim
government said that participation in the meeting
with Pachachi should not be construed as approval of
a delay of the elections.
On November 28, Barham Saleh, Iraq’s deputy prime
minister and a leader of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, said the elections should go ahead as
scheduled. “Sticking to that timetable will be
difficult,” Saleh told the BBC. “But delaying
elections will be much more difficult because it
will have serious ramifications to the political
process, to the issue of legitimacy, and surely all
of us do not want to give the terrorists the
slightest of technical wins in that situation.”
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