Use of Kurdish Troops In Baghdad Debated

[ProSense]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/15/AR2007011501045.html">Use of Kurdish Troops In Baghdad Debated

Plan Is Part of Bush's New Strategy

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 16, 2007; Page A15

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 pesh merga 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.

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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."

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Transcript: John Kerry on the Ed Schultz Show today

JK: What the green light means is that they are going to be an equal opportunity hunter of militia who are death squad militia, bad-guy militias on either side. That's what it means – that' they're going to go after those militias, the bad guys. Now, that's, you know, that's all well and good, and you can get a certain number of militia folks, and you can do it. But you're also going to be stirring up the hornet's nest. And at the same time, without enough troops to be able to quell the total amount of violence in the country, I can tell you from formerly being in a country where we had 500,000 troops, and I was one of them on the ground in Vietnam, and you tried like hell to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and you tried hard to look at a piece of paper that had a name on it and see if that's really the piece of paper the guy on the contraband list – you know, discerning these things is very difficult. Our guys don't speak Arabic.

ES: Yeah.

JK: Our guys are going to have a hell of a time out there, and some of the troops they're talking about putting in there with the Pesh Murga, who are kurds – they don't speak Arabic, either!