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Sending Kurdish Troops into Baghdad will
not make many friends for the Kurds
16.1.2007 |
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Use of Kurdish Troops In
Baghdad Debated
January 16, 2007
The Kurdish makeup of two of the three Iraqi army
brigades due to be sent to Baghdad under President
Bush's new strategic plan is drawing concern from
Iraqi and U.S. experts.
Questions have been raised about whether the Kurds
would fight Sunni insurgents in Baghdad at a time
when some Sunni clerics and organizations have
spoken out against aiding U.S. troops and the Iraqi
government. But there is also concern that the
soldiers would be heavy-handed if sent into heavily
Shiite areas.
Recognized as being among the better-trained
fighters in Iraq, the two brigades were formed out
of Kurdistan's Peshmerga militia. They received
training from the U.S. military and were integrated
into the Iraqi army. Some battalions were used
successfully in the Mosul area in November 2004.
Others fought in Fallujah, and some Kurds are part
of the mixed Iraqi special operations forces brigade
that has seen action in Baghdad.
Sunni Muslim in religion, the Kurds consider
themselves ethnically distinct from Arabs, a group
that includes most Shiite and Sunni Iraqis. While
many of their officers speak some Arabic, most of
the troops do not. Their government flies the
Kurdish, not Iraqi, flag and desires independence.
North of Baghdad, in oil-rich Kirkuk, Peshmerga
troops have been fighting for more than a year
against Shiite militiamen linked to Moqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr's group is supporting
Shiites being forced from the city by Kurds
interested in their autonomous region annexing
Kirkuk.
A former senior CIA operations officer who is
familiar with Iraq said yesterday that sending the
units into Baghdad "will not make many friends for
the Kurds, depending on where they go." But, said
the officer, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, "if you are going in to clear a
majority-Sunni area, better to use Kurdish rather
than Shia troops. . . . They are obviously better
than Iraqi police and more professional."
Last week, Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker and a
prominent member of the Iraqi Kurdish Coalition,
declared his opposition to Kurds going into Baghdad.
"There are fears that a fight like this, pitting
Kurds against the Arabs, is bound to add an ethnic
touch to the conflict," Othman told the Iraqi
newspaper Az-Zaman. "I am against the move . . . and
there are many in the Iraqi parliament who are
against it, too."
But the deployment holds appeal for the Kurdistan
Regional Government, because in return, the Baghdad
government would be ready to provide it an
additional share of the national budget, a Kurdish
official told the New Anatolian, a Kurdish
newspaper, last week.
A senior U.S. military officer familiar with Iraq,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the
Kurdish troops' "salaries, equipment and operating
expenses are paid for by the Iraqi MOD [Ministry of
Defense], so that's probably just the usual attempt
to bargain for a little extra."
Former U.S. ambassador Peter W. Galbraith, who has
helped Kurdish officials in the post-Saddam Hussein
period, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
last Thursday that the Kurdish fighters "are
ultimately loyal not to the national chain of
command or the nominal chain of command, but to
their political party leaders" -- in this case, to
the regional government.
At a hearing Friday of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the deployment of
the Kurds in Baghdad could bring "balance in that
they are not either for Sunnis or for Shia but for
Iraq." But Sen. Jack Reed (D -R.I.) countered, "I
think they are for the Kurds."
Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies who has studied
the Iraq war, described Bush's new strategy
yesterday as "an experiment based on high risks,"
only one of which is the use of the Kurds.
"They were brought in because other Iraqi army units
are too Shiite," he said, "and so are the lesser of
two evils."
washingtonpost com
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