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Iraqi Kurdistan: Turkey's Gaza?
27.2.2008
By Patrick Cockburn
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February 27, 2008
Iraq is disintegrating faster than ever. The Turkish
army invaded the north of the country last week and
is still there. Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming like
Gaza where Israel can send in its tanks and
helicopters at will.
The US, so sensitive to any threat to Iraqi
sovereignty from Iran or Syria, has blandly
consented to the Turkish attack on the one part of
Iraq which was at peace. The Turkish government
piously claims that its army is in pursuit of PKK
Turkish Kurd guerrillas, but it is unlikely to
inflict serious damage on them as they hide in
long-prepared bunkers and deep ravines of the
Kurdish mountains. What the Turkish incursion is
doing is weakening the Kurdistan Regional
Government, the autonomous Kurdish zone, the
creation of which is one of the few concrete
achievements of the US and British invasion of Iraq
five years ago.
One of the most extraordinary developments in the
Iraqi war has been the success with which the White
House has been able to persuade so much of the
political and media establishment in the US that, by
means of "the Surge", an extra 30,000 US troops, it
is on the verge of political and military success in
Iraq. All that is needed now, argue US generals, is
political reconciliation between the Iraqi
communities.
Few demands could be more hypocritical. American
success in reducing the level of violence over the
last year has happened precisely because Iraqis are
so divided. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq were the heart
of the rebellion against the American occupation. In
fighting the US forces,www.ekurd.net
they were highly
successful. But in 2006, after the bombing of the
Shia shrine at Samarra, Baghdad and central Iraq was
wracked by a savage civil war between Shia and
Sunni. In some months the bodies of 3,000 civilians
were found, and many others lie buried in the desert
or disappeared into the river. I do not know an
Iraqi family that did not lose a relative, and
usually more than one.
The Shia won this civil war. By the end of 2006 they
held three quarters of Baghdad. The Sunni rebels,
fighting the Mehdi Army Shia militia and the Shia,
dominated the Iraqi army and police, and also under
pressure from al Qa'ida, decided to end their war
with US forces. They formed al-Sahwa, the Awakening
movement, which is now allied to and paid for by the
US.
In effect Iraq now has an 80,000 strong Sunni
militia which does not hide its contempt for the
Iraqi government, which it claims is dominated by
Iranian controlled militias. The former
anti-American guerrillas have largely joined al-Sahwa.
The Shia majority, for its part, is determined not
to let the Sunni win back their control of the Iraqi
state. Power is more fragmented than ever.
This all may sound like good news for America. For
the moment its casualties are down. Fewer Iraqi
civilians are being slaughtered. But the Sunni have
not fallen in love with the occupation. The
fundamental weakness of the US position in Iraq
remains its lack of reliable allies outside
Kurdistan. At one moment, British officers used to
lecture their American counterparts, much to their
irritation, about the British Army's rich experience
of successful counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya
and Northern Ireland. "That showed a fundamental
misunderstanding of Iraq on our part," a former
British officer in Basra told me in exasperation.
"In Malaya the guerrillas all came from the minority
Chinese community and in Northern Ireland from the
minority Roman Catholics. Basra was exactly the
opposite. The majority supported our enemies. We had
no friends there."
This lack of allies may not be so immediately
obvious in Baghdad and central Iraq because both
Shia and Sunni are willing and at times eager to
make tactical alliances with US forces. But in the
long term neither Sunni nor Shia Arab want the
Americans to stay in Iraq. Hitherto the only
reliable American allies have been the Kurds, who
are now discovering that Washington is not going to
protect them against Turkey.
Very little is holding Iraq together. The government
is marooned in the Green Zone. Having declared the
Surge a great success, the US military commanders
need just as many troops to maintain a semblance of
control now as they did before the Surge. The mainly
Shia police force regards al-Sahwa as
anti-government guerrillas wearing new uniforms.
The Turkish invasion should have given the
government in Baghdad a chance to defend Iraq's
territorial integrity and burnish its patriotic
credentials. Instead the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki
has chosen this moment to have his regular medical
check up in London,www.ekurd.net
a visit which his
colleagues say is simply an excuse to escape
Baghdad. Behind him he has left a country which is
visibly falling apart.
independent co.uk
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