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KIRKUK,
Kurdistan-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 and achieve two ends:
• Seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk -- and possibly
half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
• 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 long have 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" -- said.
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.
Both 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 large
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 act 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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