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Iraqi Sunnis Brace for Surge of US,
Kurdish Troops
10.1.2007
By David Enders |
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Comparing Kurds and
Arabs is like comparing apples and oranges, they
cannot work together.
January 10, 2007
Successive waves of ethnic cleansing that have
washed over Baghdad in recent weeks are spreading to
neighborhoods that had until now been spared.
"Today two of the Shiite families on our street
received threats," said a woman living in Baghdad's
Sadia district, a majority-Sunni area where until
now the presence of the Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite
militia, had apparently pre-empted cleansing.
As the Bush Administration seeks to send as many as
20,000 more US troops to Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki announced Saturday that three more Iraqi
army units will also be deployed in the capital. The
units will come from the Shiite south and the
Kurdish north, where the military is little more
than militia units loyal to various political
leaderships.
Salam al-Midi is a Kurd and a former US military
translator living in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the two
major Kurdish political parties use peshmerga units
(Kurdistan National Guards) to maintain a police
state. In Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, three
hours north of Baghdad, Midi helped the military
train these units, which essentially make up the
police force in the largely Arab city. Midi said the
presence of peshmerga in Mosul only exacerbates
decades-old tensions between Kurds and Arabs over
political dominance in the city.
"They don't know the
language, the Arabic language, it's hard. It's one
of the major difficulties they will face," Midi
said. "Second, they are Kurds. Comparing Kurds and
Arabs is like comparing apples and oranges. They
cannot work together. For sure, terrorist
organizations are going to react, and their
reactions are going to be bad. And at the same time
the Kurdish side will want to take revenge on the
Arabs, the Iraqi people."
Sunni parliamentarians have complained that the plan
does not focus heavily enough on battling Shiite
militias like the Mahdi Army, which is blamed for
engaging in ethnic cleansing and assassinations.
Many Shiites, on the other hand, view the militia as
necessary to provide any modicum of safety against
Sunni guerrillas and lawlessness. The Mahdi Army
reportedly has begun a conscription drive in Sadr
City in response to the plan, compelling each family
to send one man between the ages of 15 and 45. Last
year the militia also sent troops to Mosul in
response to an increased armed Kurdish presence.
Many of the Shiites Saddam Hussein drove from
southern Iraq were resettled in his Arabization
campaigns of Kurdish areas.
Muthanna Harith al-Dhari, the son of Harith al-Dhari,
the spokesman of Iraq's influential Association of
Muslim Scholars, a hard-line Sunni group, pointed
out that this is not the first time security plans
for the capital have been announced. As violence
rose steadily throughout last year, sweeps of
Baghdad have done little to impede the ability of
Iraqi guerrillas and militiamen to attack US troops
or one another. December was the third deadliest
month of the war for US troops and the deadliest for
Iraqis.
Harith al-Dhari left Iraq after being threatened
with arrest by the current government and accused of
terrorist activities by Muqtada al-Sadr, the most
influential hard-line Shiite cleric and the Mahdi
Army's nominal leader. But Dhari's son Muthanna, who
remains in Baghdad, said that past security
plans--which mostly amounted to sweeps of
neighborhoods known for Sunni guerrilla
activity--created resentment among the population.
He also warned against adding US troops.
Article: www.eKurd.net
"We think that the security plan that started today
does not follow good principles," the younger Dhari
said. "To figure out the situation, they should take
into account who is responsible for poor security.
They have a lot of foreign troops making all these
problems, and now they will send more and it will
make a bigger problem. They will search the areas
where they think the problems are starting. Can they
tell us if the security plans they have used until
now have had any success? I can tell you there is
nothing new here, it is the same old thing. They
just will make more checkpoints, which will make
people's lives more difficult.
In largely Sunni cities such as Falluja and Samarra,
the presence of Shiite militias and Kurdish
peshmerga in the military has already added acrimony
to claims of collective punishment, round-ups, raids
and death-squad activity.
That record makes many Iraqis uneasy when they see
announcements like the Iraqi Ministry of Defense
recent disclosure that the US military will provide
4,000 armored personnel carriers, 1,800 Humvees and
sixteen helicopter gunships to the Iraqi military.
Until now, the United States has been reluctant to
provide such heavy materiel.
"Any support to the sectarianism and the security
mess will be preparation for the civil war. This
will increase the violence in Iraq, and they will
fail again," said Saleh Mutlaq, leader of the Iraqi
Dialogue Front, a secular party accused by its
critics of links to the previous government.
"America is sending tools to strengthen sectarian
strife and the civil war. These tools are dirty and
will be given to dirty people."
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