U.S. troops raided the KDP offices in Kirkuk Sat­ur­day night, seiz­ing AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Amer­i­cans also arrested a senior KDP leader. A PUK office also was raided.
The raids are con­nected to the “recent eth­nic violence”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000637.php between Turk­men, Arabs and Kurds in Kirkuk that has left almost 20 peo­ple dead since “August”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000445.php#000445. Six have been killed since last week.
“We are dis­ap­pointed by this,” said Moham­mad Sabir, chief PUK rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Wash­ing­ton when I con­tacted him this after­noon. “We are very close to the U.S. but I don’t know [the rea­son for] the raid. Maybe some Turk­men or Arabs gave them infor­ma­tion that the PUK had many weapons. I don’t know, really.“
He added that the PUK was work­ing to clear up any mis­un­der­stand­ing.
The KDP rep­re­sen­ta­tive in D.C., Farhad Barzani, said he knew noth­ing about the raid and couldn’t com­ment.
The “Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party”:http://www.kdp.pp.se/ and the “Patri­otic Union of Kurdistan”:http://www.puk.org are the two main Kur­dish par­ties in Iraq and have been push­ing for a fed­eral sys­tem guar­an­tee­ing Kurds “sig­nif­i­cant autonomy”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000046.php#000046 since last year. Arabs, Turk­men and sur­round­ing coun­tries have all expressed alarm and dis­plea­sure over the idea of sig­nif­i­cant Kur­dish autonomy.