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Kurdish soldiers may further inflame
Baghdad
23.1.2007 |
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January 23, 2007
If you're depending on three battalions of Iraqi
soldiers to help pacify Baghdad, as the U.S.
military is under the new Bush plan, the two
battalions of tough, well-trained Kurdish peshmerga
soldiers gearing up for the assault are about the
best you can do. That, unfortunately, is the
problem.
Iraqi Kurdistan, in the country's northeastern
sector, is by far the most peaceful and stable
region in Iraq.
The Kurds are Sunni Muslims and therefore better
able than Shiite soldiers to attack Sunni insurgents
without further inflaming the religious enmity
tearing Baghdad apart.
But Kurds are not Arabs. In fact, they have a deep
distrust, even hatred, of Arabs - and the feeling is
mutual. Inserting Kurdish soldiers - virtually none
of whom speak Arabic - into Baghdad's sectarian
warfare is extremely unpopular among the Kurdish
population, who don't want to see their men drawn
into the Sunni-Shiite struggle.
Furthermore, former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith,
who is close to the Kurds, told the Senate last week
that Kurdish soldiers "are ultimately loyal not to
the national chain of command or the nominal chain
of command" but to the regional Kurdish government -
which last year ordered that the Kurdish flag
replace the Iraqi flag over government buildings.
And Baghdad's Arabs - both Sunni and Shiite - have a
justifiable fear that once Kurdish troops engage in
the intense combat that awaits them, they will take
revenge on them for the ghastly abuse Kurds suffered
under Saddam Hussein. The coming
assault risks opening an ethnic front in the
burgeoning civil war.
The U.S. has long failed to understand how deep the
ethnic and sectarian hatreds run in a nation defined
only by arbitrary lines on a British-drawn map and
held together through Mr. Hussein's iron grip of
terror. At this late date, it is unrealistic to
believe that Iraq's desire for national unity is
greater than its sectarian hatred - which is why we
believe that some form of partition has the only
reasonable chance, however slim, of averting all-out
civil war.
Dispatching Kurdish troops to fight in a place where
they are not wanted and do not want to go, to defend
a government to which they feel little loyalty, runs
a dangerous risk of further destabilization.
With luck, they will succeed, or at least fail
without blowback.
But given Iraq's ethnic and religious powder keg,
those Kurdish battalions could well be descending
from the north on the war-torn capital like torches
aflame.
Dallasnews com | MCT
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