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BAGHDAD, Iraq -
By allowing Iraq's new military to be organized
largely along ethnic and religious lines, the United
States may inadvertently be deepening the divisions
among the country's Kurdish north, Shiite Muslim
south and Sunni Muslim Arab west and leaving the
sects to fight over the heart of the country.
The creation of a national army to help unify and
pacify Iraq is key to U.S. plans to begin
significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq
in 2006, and President Bush and other top officials
frequently cite the growing number of trained Iraqi
troops as evidence of progress.
Iraqi officials and political leaders, however, said
the dominance of Shiite and Kurdish militia members
in many Iraqi army units had given Sunni insurgents
a broader base of support and turned more Sunnis
against the U.S. effort in Iraq.
The Sunnis "see them (insurgent fighters) as the
only shield that can save them from what they think
are official, militia-linked security forces," said
Saleem Abdul Kareem, a political analyst at Karbala
University in southern Iraq.
Thiab Abdul Hadi, a city council member in the
western Sunni city of Fallujah, said that sentiment
was held by most people in his town.
"It is our duty to resist the (American) occupation
because this occupier helped the militias enter our
country," Hadi said. "The resistance is fighting the
Americans because they back these militias."
The polarization of the Iraqi army began during the
summer of 2003, when American officials in Baghdad
disbanded it and left more than 200,000 troops, many
of them Sunnis, out of work.
The Sunnis, who'd dominated the officer corps under
Saddam Hussein's Baath party, were replaced largely
by Shiites and Kurds, many of them former members of
religious or ethnic militias. Some militia units
were transplanted nearly wholesale into the new
army.
The perception that different army units are tools
of Shiite or Kurdish ambitions has been reinforced
during the past two years as U.S. troops conducting
offensives in western Iraq and in Sunni
neighborhoods in Baghdad teamed up with Iraqi
soldiers and Interior Ministry police commandos who
were mostly Shiites or Kurds.
American military commanders say the ranks of the
Iraqi army are roughly representative of the
national population - about 60 percent Shiite, 20
percent Sunni and 15 to 20 percent Kurdish - but the
Iraqi army's top spokesman confirmed this week that
a disproportionate number of the soldiers are
Shiites.
"The majority of soldiers are from the south and
they are Shiite," said Maj. Gen. Salih Sarhan, a
Shiite himself, who added that intimidation from Abu
Musab al Zarqawi, an ally of al-Qaida, and others
has discouraged Sunnis from signing up. "In the
areas where the majority of people are Sunni we
would like to have them, but they don't want to join
because of threats from terrorists like Zarqawi and
the Baathists."
Nearly all the new army's recruits have come from
southern Shiite cities such as Basra and Nasiriyah
where unemployment is high, Sarhan said.
Those cities, and many others like them, are home to
thousands of Shiites who are loyal to militias such
as the Badr Organization, the armed wing of the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one
of Iraq's leading Shiite political parties. To make
matters worse, Badr and other Shiite and Kurdish
militias have been supported by Iran, the archenemy
of Iraq's Sunnis.
Badr also has infiltrated the intelligence sections
of the Interior Ministry and many of its police
commando units in Baghdad, where Sunni groups have
documented dozens of cases in which uniformed men
have raided Sunni neighborhoods and detained men
who've later been found dead.
Earlier in December, a senior U.S. military officer
in Baghdad said dismantling the militias wouldn't be
easy and that doing it would be up to the Iraqi
government.
"The question is how do they disband this
organization," said the officer, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of
the subject. "There's the exact same danger with
precipitously disbanding them like we did the Iraqi
army ... where will they all go? What will they do
when you take their jobs from them?"
For now, the Shiites and Kurds dominate the nation's
army.
In the south, the army's 8th and 10th divisions are
almost entirely Shiite, Sarhan said. In the northern
Kurdish areas, the 2nd and 4th divisions are
overwhelmingly Kurdish. The 3rd Division is also in
the north, and its units in Kurdish territory are
mostly Kurds, though Iraqi commanders said the units
in Sunni Arab areas had larger percentages of Arabs.
Sarhan said the two army divisions in Baghdad were
more evenly split. But when a Knight Ridder reporter
visited a brigade of one of those divisions earlier
this year, the soldiers were almost all Shiites, and
many of them spoke of exacting violent revenge on
the Sunni population.
Similar ethnic and religious polarization virtually
destroyed Lebanon's armed forces more than two
decades ago, and it isn't just Sunnis who are
worried about the divide in Iraq's armed forces.
Watching an Iraqi army patrol pass his cell phone
shop recently in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of
Kadhemiya, Shifa Hamad shook his head. Several of
the trucks had Shiite religious stickers on their
windshields.
"I don't want sectarianism in our army; this will
lead us to a crossroads and, God forbid, there could
be civil war," said Hamad, who's also a Shiite. "If
the government continues to do this, the division
will continue and the north and the south could
break away from the country."
During a Knight Ridder interview with the Iraqi
general who commands the army's 4th Division in the
northern city of Mosul, U.S. Col. Mike Cloy sat on a
sofa and, lighting a Romeo and Juliet cigar,
listened to the conversation. Cloy was visiting the
general as part of his duties with the American
military assistance team assigned to the 4th
Division.
Looking over at Cloy, Maj. Gen. Jamal Khalid, a
Kurd, chose his words carefully. The general said
exactly what Cloy wanted to hear.
"We do not keep militias inside the Iraqi army,"
Khalid said. "We as the army take nobody's side. We
take the government's side."
Asked if he had any worries about the presence of
Kurdish militiamen in the Iraqi army, Cloy said, "I
have no concerns in that regard."
"You don't ever hear any of that discussion amongst
the ranks," said Cloy, who's from Columbia, S.C. "I
am impressed with the focus the leadership and the
soldiers have ... they are not, from what I can
tell, concerned with the larger politics."
Afterward, Cloy met with several of Khalid's brigade
commanders.
On the ride out of Mosul in a convoy of sport
utility vehicles, one of them, Brig. Gen. Abdullah
Ramadan, laughed when he was asked about the
presence of the Kurdish militia - the Peshmerga - in
the Iraqi army.
"I am a Kurd and I have a long history with the
Peshmerga," said Ramadan, who commands an army
brigade in the northern city of Irbil, where he was
formerly the deputy commander of a Peshmerga
brigade. "My loyalty is to the ... Peshmerga."
© 2005, Knight Ridder
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