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.

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 who 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.

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.

“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.”

LOW EXPECTATIONS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 had acted improperly in the field.

“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

American military officials have said they’re trying to get a broader mix of sects in the Iraqi units.

However, Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi army on the edge of Kirkuk, said he’d resist any attempts to dilute the Kurdish presence in his brigade.

“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.”

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.

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.

“Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs,” Hamid Afandi, the minister of Peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of 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.”

ENTRENCHED ALREADY

In addition to putting former Peshmerga in the Iraqi army, the Kurds have deployed small Peshmerga units in buildings throughout northern Iraq, according to militia leaders.

While it’s hard to calculate the number of these Peshmerga fighters, interviews with militia members suggest it’s well in excess of 10,000.

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.

“All of them belong to the central government, but inside they are Kurds . . . all Peshmerga are under the orders of our leadership,” Afandi said.

Jafar Mustafir, a close advisor 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.

“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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