- KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders
have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army
divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize
the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest
city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
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- Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops
in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing
American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining
traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national
command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests
in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.
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- The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms
they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish
militia - and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks.
Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially
Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.
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- "It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs
in our own battalion," said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in
the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk.
"Kirkuk will be ours."
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- The Kurds have readied their troops not only because
they've long yearned to establish an independent state but also because
their leaders expect Iraq to disintegrate, senior leaders in the Peshmerga
- literally, "those who face death" - told Knight Ridder. The
Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims, and are ethnically distinct from
Arabs.
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- Their strategy mirrors that of Shiite Muslim parties
in southern Iraq, which have stocked Iraqi army and police units with members
of their own militias and have maintained a separate militia presence throughout
Iraq's central and southern provinces. The militias now are illegal under
Iraqi law but operate openly in many areas. Peshmerga leaders said in interviews
that they expected the Shiites to create a semi-autonomous and then independent
state in the south as they would do in the north.
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- The Bush administration - and Iraq's neighbors - oppose
the nation's fragmentation, fearing that it could lead to regional collapse.
To keep Iraq together, U.S. plans to withdraw significant numbers of American
troops in 2006 will depend on turning U.S.-trained Kurdish and Shiite militiamen
into a national army.
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- The interviews with Kurdish troops, however, suggested
that as the American military transfers more bases and areas of control
to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to militias that are bent
more on advancing ethnic and religious interests than on defeating the
insurgency and preserving national unity.
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- A U.S. military officer in Baghdad with knowledge of
Iraqi army operations said he was frustrated to hear of the Iraqi soldiers'
comments but that he had seen no reports suggesting that they would acted
improperly in the field.
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- "There's talk and there's acts, and their actions
are that they follow the orders of the Iraqi chain of command and they
secure their sectors well," said the officer, who refused to be identified
because he's not authorized to speak on the subject
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- American military officials have said they're trying
to get a broader mix of sects in the Iraqi units.
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- However, Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi
army on the edge of Kirkuk, said he would resist any attempts to dilute
the Kurdish presence in his brigade.
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- "The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab
soldiers from the south," Naji said. "After two weeks of service,
we sent them away. We did not accept them. We will not let them carry through
with their plans to bring more Arab soldiers here."
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- One key to the Kurds' plan for independence is securing
control of Kirkuk, the seat of a province that holds some of Iraq's largest
oil fields. Should the Kurds push for independence, Kirkuk and its oil
would be a key economic engine.
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- The city's Kurdish population was driven out by former
Sunni Arab dictator Saddam Hussein, whose "Arabization" program
paid thousands of Arab families to move there and replace recently deported
or murdered Kurds.
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- "Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the
Arabs," Hamid Afandi, the minister of Peshmerga for the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, one of the two major Kurdish groups, said in an interview
at his office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. "If we can resolve this
by talking, fine, but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting."
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- In addition to putting former Peshmerga in the Iraqi
army, the Kurds have deployed small Peshmerga units in buildings and compounds
throughout northern Iraq, according to militia leaders. While it's hard
to calculate the number of these active Peshmerga fighters, interviews
with militia members suggest that it's well in excess of 10,000.
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- Afandi said his group had sent at least 10,000 Peshmerga
to the Iraqi army in northern Iraq, a figure substantiated in interviews
with officers in two Iraqi army divisions in the region.
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- "All of them belong to the central government, but
inside they are Kurds ... all Peshmerga are under the orders of our leadership,"
Afandi said.
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- Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim
president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, a longtime rival of the Kurdistan Democratic Party,
echoed that.
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- "We will do our best diplomatically, and if that
fails we will use force" to secure borders for an independent Kurdistan,
Mustafir said. "The government in Baghdad will be too weak to use
force against the will of the Kurdish people."
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- Mustafir said his party had sent at least 4,000 Peshmerga
of its own into the Iraqi army in the area.
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- The Kurds have positioned their men in Iraqi army units
on the western flank of Kirkuk, in the area that includes Irbil and the
volatile city of Mosul, and on the eastern flank in the area that includes
the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.
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- The Iraqi army's 2nd Division, which oversees the Irbil-Mosul
area, has some 12,000 soldiers, and at least 90 percent of them are Kurds,
according to the division's executive officer.
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- Of the 3,000 Iraqi soldiers in Irbil, some 2,500 were
together in a Peshmerga unit previously based in the city. An entire brigade
in Mosul, about 3,000 soldiers, is composed of three battalions that were
transferred almost intact from former Peshmerga units, with many of the
same soldiers and officers in the same positions. Mosul's population is
split between Kurds and Arabs, and any move by Peshmerga units to take
it almost certainly would lead to an eruption of Arab violence.
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- "The Parliament must solve the issue of Kurdistan.
If not, we know how to deal with this: We will send Kurdish forces to enforce
Kurdistan's boundaries, and that will have to include the newly liberated
areas such as the Kurdish sections of Mosul," 1st Lt. Herish Namiq
said. "Every single one of us is Peshmerga. Our entire battalion is
Peshmerga."
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- Namiq was riding in an unarmored pickup in an Arab neighborhood
in eastern Mosul where Sunni Arab insurgents frequently shoot at his men.
As he leaned out the window with his AK-47, scanning the streets, he said,
"We will do our duty as Peshmerga."
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- Firas Ahmed, the assistant to the head of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party office in Mosul, invited a Knight Ridder reporter to inspect
the local Peshmerga brigade, motioning to a compound across the street.
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- It housed the headquarters of the 4th Brigade of the
Iraqi army's 2nd Division.
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- "We cannot openly say they are Peshmerga,"
Ahmed said. "We will take you to see the Peshmerga, but they will
be wearing Iraqi army uniforms."
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- Ahmed's boss, Khasrow Kuran, grinned and chimed in: "We
cannot say `Peshmerga' here."
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- The 4th Brigade soldiers who met Ahmed at the front gate
saluted him and said, openly, that they reported to Afandi, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party's Peshmerga commander.
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- Col. Sabar Saleem, a former Peshmerga who's the head
intelligence officer for the 4th Brigade, said he answered to the Peshmerga
leadership. He also said he had little use for most Sunni Arabs.
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- "All of the Sunnis are facilitating the terrorists.
They have little influence compared with the Kurds and Shiites, so they
allow the terrorists to operate to create pressure and get political concessions,"
Saleem said. "So they should be killed, too ... the Sunni political
leaders in Baghdad are supporting the insurgency, too, and there will be
a day when they are tried for it."
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- To the east, in the Iraqi army's 4th Division, is a brigade
of about 3,000 troops in Sulaimaniyah that's also a near-replica of a former
Peshmerga brigade.
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- Because of a U.S. military mandate, the 4th Division
battalion serving in Kirkuk is about 50 percent Kurdish, 40 percent Arab
and 10 percent Turkmen. The battalion on the outskirts of Kirkuk is about
60 percent Kurdish.
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- Capt. Fakhir Mohammed, a former Peshmerga and the operations
officer for the battalion on Kirkuk's edge, said he wasn't concerned that
the Kurds had only a simple majority in the two Kirkuk battalions: "It's
not a problem, because we have an entire brigade in Sulaimaniyah that is
all Kurd. They would come down here and take the Kurdish side."
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- Sgt. Ahmed Abdullah agreed.
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- "There are thousands of us Peshmerga, and it is
our duty to protect the borders of Kurdistan ... we will fight to hold
Kirkuk at any price," Abdullah said. "We will fight that battalion
(in Kirkuk) if they stand in our way."
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