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Kurdish Battalion Moves Toward Baghdad to Participate in Major Security Plan

By YAHYA BARZANJI

The Associated Press

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq - A predominantly Kurdish battalion based in this northern city has started the march toward Baghdad, its commander said, as the Iraqi military gears up for a major security operation aimed at pacifying the capital.
Hundreds of soldiers boarded dozens of jeeps, Humvees and trucks on Monday to begin the trip to Baghdad, 160 miles away.
Members of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 4th Division will undergo more specialized military training before being deployed in the capital, said Brig. Gen. Anwar Golani, the brigade's commander. He said the training will be conducted at a base in western Baghdad under the supervision of U.S. troops.
The Iraqi government has not announced a start date for the new security operation announced by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Jan. 6. President Bush followed by pledging to send 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq, most to the Baghdad area, as part of his new war strategy.
Thousands of Iraqi and U.S. troops are expected to do neighborhood-to-neighborhood search operations to clear Baghdad of Sunni Muslim insurgents and local militias such as the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Mahdi Army has been blamed for much of the sectarian killings in the past months.
Another Kurdish brigade is undergoing intensive urban combat training near the northern city of Irbil in preparation to move to Baghdad.
It will not be the first time that the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 4th Division has served in volatile areas. It also spent seven months helping to fight Sunni insurgents in the towns of Balad and Duluiyah, some 45 miles north of Baghdad, Golani said, adding that 14 of his troops were killed and 55 were wounded while there.
Only the 1st Battalion of the brigade was heading to Baghdad because two others are needed to protect oil facilities near the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, Golani said. He added that they have started setting up a 4th Battalion after a request from the defense ministry.
Golani said many of his soldiers were formerly part of Kurdish militias known as peshmergas that fought Saddam Hussein's regime for decades, making them experienced fighters. He said they had been integrated into the Iraqi army.
"We did benefit a lot from our previous experience," Golani said. "We have experience in how to repulse attacks."
Most of the troops are Kurds and don't speak Arabic, but they were able to overcome that problem in Balad and Duluiyah by enlisting Arab members and drivers to help with translation.
One of the soldiers, Heman Ahmed, said his mother asked him to leave the army rather than go to Baghdad but he refused, noting that many of his friends were going and he couldn't desert them.
"I myself would prefer to serve in Kurdistan because I have experience here and know the region," he said, wearing a beige military uniform, sunglasses and a Kurdish turban. "I am worried about going to Baghdad, but in the end we are soldiers and we have to abide by orders."
Golani acknowledged that some soldiers had expressed reservations about going to an unfamiliar area, but he said the mission was an important one.
"Our aim is to stop the bloodshed between the Sunnis and Shiites in addition to protecting civilians who are suffering as a result of that," he said.



http://abcnews.go.com/International/...ory?id=2797556

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To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

Jay

huh, isnt this a bad idea?

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A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Archer

kurds dont love sadr or the sunnis.

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Karmani Vyapurutham Dhanuhu

My bow is stretched for its task

Jay

But the ordinary Shias and Sunnis dont exactly like them

Stan187

Plus, if most of them don't speak Arabic, and aren't trusted by Arabs, they're starting to look a lot more like US troops in the sense of locals being able to relate to them and trust them.

astralis

remember,

the kurds don't have to be liked- just being "not hated" is good enough.

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Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

gunnut

Would the average Iraqi dislike American forces going through his neighborhood more, or the Kurdish forces going through his neighborhood more?

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"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

astralis

gunnut,

good question- i guess that would depend on the locals' previous interactions with both the kurds and the american units that were there. generally speaking, though, while the kurds aren't arabs, what lawrence of arabia said still holds.

"Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly."

Jay

Dont think so. Kurdish are still Sunnis and any plan to deploy them in Shia area would be dealt accordingly.

It may be a good idea to deploy them in Sunni areas, but then Iraqi Sunni's dont exactly trust the Kurds.

All in all, its gonna look like war of clans much like Africa.

Jay

Some more news, which pretty much sums up my thought,

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.

North of Baghdad, in oil-rich Kirkuk, pesh merga 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. Its all money

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