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SARAI
SUBHAN AGHA, Iraq,- The camouflage-clad
militiamen marched down from the mountains in four
columns of hundreds each, stomping their boots in
unison.
"Keep looking forward!" an officer yelled.
"Kurdistan or death!" the soldiers shouted at once,
their words thundering over the sound of heels
striking the ground.
Here at a training camp in the eastern hills of
Iraqi Kurdistan, there is little doubt about to whom
these soldiers owe their allegiance.
Many say their first loyalty lies with a major
Kurdish political party. Then they offer it to
Kurdistan, the rugged autonomous region in northern
Iraq the size of Switzerland. There is little
mention of the nation of Iraq or the Iraqi Army.
"All of the pesh merga of Kurdistan, we're fighting
for Kurdistan," one of the soldiers, Fermen Ibrahim,
25, told a visitor, calling the militia by its
Kurdish name, which means "those who face death."
As political jockeying rages in Baghdad to determine
the shape of the new government - how Islamic it
will be, whether it has strong or weak central
powers - one of the most troublesome issues emerging
is whether political parties, especially those of
the Kurds and Shiites, can keep their private
armies. Kurdish leaders say they intend to write
into the new constitution a system granting
considerable powers to individual regions, one that
will legitimize their use of the pesh merga.
If the Kurds succeed, they will achieve the right of
regional powers to set up their own armies, possibly
leading to warlord-style fiefs across Iraq. Until
their strong showing in the recent national
elections, Kurdish leaders appeared to agree, at
least in public, with the American goal of
dismantling militias. Now they stand in open
defiance of it.
The pesh merga, with recruits from two Kurdish
parties, total about 100,000 soldiers. A source of
ethnic pride, they fought tenaciously against Saddam
Hussein and are now relied upon by American
commanders to battle the Arab-led insurgency in the
north. Perhaps most important in the current power
vacuum, they provide Kurdish leaders with armed
backing in their demands for broad autonomy.
"We want to keep our pesh merga because they are a
symbol of resistance," said Massoud Barzani, the
leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the son
of Mustafa Barzani, a revered Kurdish leader who
founded the pesh merga in the 1960's. "It's not a
matter to be discussed or negotiated."
If the Kurds get the constitution they want, the
pesh merga would nominally fall under the oversight
of the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, Kurdish
officials say, but in reality would be controlled by
regional commanders. The two Kurdish parties each
have a ministry of pesh merga, which they say they
intend to keep.
The Kurds also say the pesh merga will maintain all
the trappings of a conventional army, with an
officers' college, training camps and armor and
artillery units all operating independently of the
rest of the Iraqi security forces.
The major Shiite parties, who have the largest share
of seats in the constitutional assembly, may try to
block the Kurds on the militia issue to limit the
autonomy of the Kurds. But those parties have
significant militias that they may seek to keep, or
to at least incorporate into the Iraqi security
forces as intact units. Their armies generally stay
hidden on the streets of Baghdad but have been
active in the Shiite heartland of the south,
operating checkpoints and patrols and, in some
cases, enforcing strict Islamic law, like cracking
down on alcohol vendors.
The leaders of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite party, have
repeatedly said that the party's Iranian-trained
armed wing, the Badr Organization, at least 15,000
strong, can help provide security in the new Iraq.
The former governing Sunni Arabs, a minority now
feeling threatened by the other groups, will
probably oppose any move by the Kurds and Shiites to
legitimize their militias.
American commanders publicly say that all armed
groups in Iraq must be state sponsored and that
militarized units should not be organized by
ethnicity or sect. But they privately acknowledge
the extreme difficulties of breaking up the
militias. Lt. Col. Eric Durr, the head of civil
affairs for the 42nd Infantry Division, charged with
overseeing eastern Kurdistan, said it was now up to
the new Iraqi government to figure out what to do
with the militias.
"It's really a political issue for the Iraqi
government to work out," he said.
The Americans are relying on the pesh merga to fight
insurgents. Across the north, particularly in the
besieged city of Mosul, American commanders have
supported Iraqi officials in deploying large units
of armed Kurds into the streets.
But the pesh merga also exemplify the pitfalls of
private armies - in the mid-1990's, the militias of
the two Kurdish parties turned their guns on each
other in a civil war that left at least 3,000 dead.
"What I see happening now in Iraq is the potential
drift toward warlordism," said Larry Diamond, a
former adviser to the Coalition Provisional
Authority, which tried but failed to disband
militias before handing sovereignty to the Iraqis
last June.
"If things go bad," he added, "if the center does
not hold, if ethnic and regional divisions are not
well and carefully managed by the country's
political leaders, particularly at the center, then
the existence of all these militias - both those
preceding the handover of power and those that have
arisen in recent months - could facilitate the
descent of the country into some kind of
Lebanon-style civil war."
The presence of the pesh merga "is bound to
strengthen the resolve of Kurdish political leaders
not to yield on their demands for far-reaching
autonomy," said Mr. Diamond, a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The pesh merga are everywhere in Iraqi Kurdistan -
along the highways, atop government buildings,
riding in convoys. They wear a hodgepodge of
uniforms, from traditional baggy outfits to desert
camouflage hand-me-downs from the United States
Army. There is one thing that appears to be
consistent, though: they think of themselves as
Kurds first and Iraqis second.
"If I work hard to protect my people and my cities,
indirectly I'll serve Iraq," Col. Mehdi Dosky, 44,
the commander of the training camp here, said as he
sat behind his desk in a dark green Iraqi Army
uniform. Two officers on a couch pored over
evaluation forms of the trainees. A map on one wall
showed the theoretical pan-Kurdish nation that Kurds
in the Middle East hope to carve out one day - a
huge territory stretching from the Mediterranean to
western Iran and taking in large parts of Turkey,
Syria, Iraq and Iran.
"We don't think it's a good idea to disband our
army," said Colonel Dosky, whose father served as a
pesh merga from the militia's first days. "We want
to keep our forces and have them protect our region.
The Kurds will protect their area, and other people
will use their forces to protect their own areas.
There are too many ethnic and religious problems
right now in Iraq."
The American dependence on such proxy armies is
clearest in Mosul, where Kurds make up nearly a
quarter of the population. In November, Sunni Arab
rebels overran police stations and forced thousands
of officers to quit, and the Arab governor requested
the aid of two Kurdish battalions of the Iraqi
National Guard.
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the head of Task Force
Olympia, the American force which until last week
was charged with controlling Mosul, used Kurds to
guard his headquarters.
But the presence of an ethnic or sect-based militia
in a diverse city can quickly inflame tensions.
Such is the case in Kirkuk, the oil-rich city where
Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen uneasily live side by side.
At the request of Arabs and Turkmen, the American
military asked pesh merga to leave the city after
Mr. Hussein fell. Last summer, Kurdish officials
said, the Americans allowed 300 pesh merga to return
temporarily to fight insurgents.
"Always, it's a sensitive issue," said Suphi Sabir,
a senior official in the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the
most prominent Turkmen party in Kirkuk. "But we
won't start a fight over it because the result would
be very bad."
Warzer Jaff contributed reporting from Mosul, Iraq,
for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com
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