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Kurds step into sectarian battle in
Baghdad
24.4.2007 |
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April
24, 2007
BAGHDAD: The Shiite mother and her son opened
their door for the soldiers on night patrol. In
walked the Americans, each brandishing an M-16
assault rifle. Next came the men wearing tan
uniforms and carrying Kalashnikovs and looking not
quite Iraqi.
They spoke Arabic with accents as thick as crude
oil.
"Are there problems in the neighborhood?" said their
leader, Captain Sardar Hamasala. "We're here for
your safety. Let us know if there are sectarian
problems or other kinds of problems - Sunnis
threatening Shia, Shia threatening Sunnis."
The black-robed mother and her son shook their
hands. The soldiers stepped back into the cool night
air of western Baghdad.
"There was a time when we couldn't go from house to
house like this among the Arabs just because we're
Kurds," Hamasala said. "Now we're trying to make
things easier for them. We're proud of that."
Kurdish soldiers from the rugged north are the
latest armed element to be introduced into Baghdad's
boiling sectarian stew. Like the Americans, they are
a slender peacekeeping force standing between the
warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs in a city of
more than six million. U.S. commanders consider them
a critical part of the escalation in Baghdad because
of their fighting prowess and perceived neutrality.
About 2,100 have been brought into the capital in
recent months.
Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but they have little
religious zeal. They drink hard and dance harder and
rarely pray five times a day. Hamasala, 30, commands
the headquarters company of the 1st Battalion, 3rd
Brigade of the 4th Iraqi Army Division, the first
Kurdish unit to enter Baghdad as part of the Bush
administration's latest plan to try to secure the
city.
"The reason why people are willing to trust the
1-3-4 is because they're Kurdish," said Captain
Benjamin Morales, 28, commander of Company B of the
1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, the U.S.
partner unit of Hamasala's company. "They don't live
in the area. They don't care about Sunni or Shia."
This is quite possibly the first time since the days
of Saladin, the revered 12th-century Kurdish
warrior-king, that Kurdish forces have occupied
swaths of Baghdad. They have been ordered to secure
the streets for their historic enemies, the Arabs.
"Allah sent Muhammad as a prophet to these people
and he couldn't solve their problems," Hamasala
said. "How are we supposed to help them?"
He added later: "Here, they still talk about what
happened 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That's the way
the Arabs think."
There have already been some clashes between the
Kurds and Arab militants. The captain's unit and
U.S. soldiers came under withering gunfire one night
when they went into two neighboring mosques to
detain hundreds of men and boys. Another Kurdish
unit battled members of the Mahdi Army, a powerful
Shiite militia, at a checkpoint in western Baghdad
this month, leaving one civilian dead and one
wounded. That unit has been trying to secure several
blocks in the Amel neighborhood to encourage
displaced Sunni Arab families to return.
Some of the Kurds here - as well as their fathers
and grandfathers and great-grandfathers - fought for
independence from Arab Iraq as militiamen called
pesh merga, or "those who face death."
Saddam Hussein retaliated by trying to wipe out
parts of the Kurdish race, killing at least 80,000
and razing villages in the Anfal campaign of 1988.
But the Kurds won de facto autonomy in 1991 after
the U.S. military set up a no-flight zone in the
north to prevent the Iraqi Army from controlling an
area the Kurds call Iraqi Kurdistan.
"I'm proud of being an officer in an army that just
years ago was killing my people and torturing my
family," Lieutenant Karwan Abdul Hadi said as he led
a night patrol on a hunt for a Shiite militant.
"It's very important to make the point that we're
not like the Arabs. We don't look for revenge. We
don't have a black heart. That's good for the
future."
The lieutenant, who reports to Hamasala, noted that
the Kurdish militias fought their own civil war from
1993 to 1998, a conflict that left thousands dead.
"But it wasn't like this," he said. "These people
don't realize how bad it is."
The company lives on an old air base in Ali Salah, a
neighborhood of western Baghdad. Arab soldiers from
another division sleep in nearby barracks, as do
U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division.
The Kurds go out on patrol with the Americans and
shun the Arabs.
"The Americans are our friends in Iraq, not the
Arabs," Hamasala said as he and 10 other Kurds left
the base one night with a U.S. foot patrol. "Even
the Americans don't trust going out on patrol with
the Arabs."
Another Kurdish officer, Lieutenant Serwan Dawa
Rashid, said one afternoon at a traffic checkpoint:
"I consider the relationship between us and the
United States to be like that between Tel Aviv and
the U.S."
The Kurds moved into the area in January. The
Americans came a few weeks later. They oversee Ali
Salah, Salaam and Topchi, neighborhoods that are
dominated by Shiite militiamen who have evicted
dozens of Sunni Arab families. The task at hand is
to keep the militias from running off the few
remaining Sunni households.
There is little doubt as to where the loyalties of
the Kurds lie. The company is from the east of the
Kurdish region, an area that has been ruled for
decades by the party of Jalal Talabani, now the
president of Iraq. Each room in the Kurdish barracks
has a poster of Talabani.
"All of us are for you because you're for us," read
the slogan on a poster of Talabani in the office of
the brigade commander, Colonel Muhammad Rostum
Muhammad.
Each Iraqi Army unit brought into Baghdad is
expected to remain here three months. Hamasala, who
graduated from a Kurdish military academy in 1991,
said he was not keen to be here, far from the
relative safety of his region.
But orders were orders. When word came of the
deployment, "our families were shocked," the captain
said.
"They call us every day, and we lie to them," he
said. "We tell them we stay inside the base. One
day, my mother called when we were out on patrol in
a market. There were cars, people, noise in the
background. I wanted to end the call. I knew she'd
suspect something was up."
This was not the first time the captain had been on
a hazardous assignment. He had been deployed for 72
days in Balad, an Arab town north of Baghdad that is
rife with Shiite and Sunni fighters. He said his
best friend was killed there when someone threw a
bomb into a military truck.
Some Kurdish politicians have criticized the
deployment of Kurds to Baghdad for fear that it will
exacerbate tensions between Kurds and Arabs. There
is talk that the soldiers have been told by their
political leaders not to get involved in the Arab
sectarian war. But Captain Ross Kinkead, the U.S.
officer who serves as a liaison with Hamasala's
company, said the Kurds have never turned down a
mission.
"They're the best soldiers I've worked with on the
Iraqi Army side in three deployments in Iraq," he
said.
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