U.S. on ground in Iraqi Kurdistan

Reuters is report­ing that the United States has qui­etly moved forces into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan to train up to 5,000 Kurds in prepar­tion for an inva­sion. Reg­u­lar read­ers might remem­ber that I posted about this back in Octo­ber. There are two things inter­est­ing about this. One, Jalal Tal­a­bani, the leader of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, which con­trols the south­ern and east­ern part of Kur­dish coun­try, said that the Kurds had finally received secu­rity guar­an­tees from the United States in case of an attack by Saddam’s forces. This is a good thing. One of my major objec­tions to this adven­ture has been America’s reluc­tance to stand by the Kurds, which it has failed sev­eral times in the past (1970s, 1980s and twice in 1991 and 1995.) The Kurds are work­ing at build­ing a nascent democ­racy in their ter­ri­tory, and while it’s hardly per­fect and prone to the Great Man the­ory of gov­ern­ment that so plagues the region, they’re try­ing. And the United States should sup­port that effort. The secu­rity guar­an­tee is a good first step. Next, the United States should sign on to the pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion for a Fed­eral Repub­lic of Iraq. It’s cer­tainly not a per­fect doc­u­ment, but again, they’re try­ing.
Sec­ondly, if the United States is actively train­ing Kurds, that obvi­ously means the Kurds have signed on to an inva­sion, which they had not when I was there. Deputy Prime Min­is­ter (KDP) Sami Abdul Rah­man told me that the Kurds would not — could not — stand in the way of Amer­i­can forces should an inva­sion come, but there would be no active help with­out the secu­rity guar­an­tees. With the train­ing and the guar­an­tees, the Kurds have secured for them­selves a place at the table when it comes time to gov­ern Iraq, apres Sad­dam
Aside: The Kur­dish spe­cial forces, of which it seemed the KDP had the most, are trained by Iraqi gen­er­als who defected to Kur­dish coun­try. They brought with them their train­ing from the Iraqi army, which inher­ited British SAS train­ing. Also, there were a num­ber of Kur­dish pesh­mer­gas who wore Amer­i­can GI uni­forms. When I asked where they came from, they just smiled and said, “smug­glers and traders.” I’ll bet.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts