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.
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About me
Hi there! Thanks for stopping in. I'm Christopher Allbritton, former AP and New York Daily News reporter. In 2002, I went stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern part of Iraq outside Saddam's direct control, looking for stories. (Some might call it "looking for trouble.") In March 2003, I made it back in time for the war, becoming the Web's first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger. With the support of thousands of readers, we raised almost $15,000. You can read my dispatches here. It was one of the moments in journalism when everything worked. It was a grand -- and successful -- experiment in independent journalism. In 2004, I moved to Iraq, where I would spend the next two years. It was a raucous, scary and exciting place with a lot of news going on. But I've since moved on to Beirut and the wider region. I now report for a variety of outlets.
Is anyone else noticing with increasingly obvious clarity that the continuing hostilities in Iraq are completely and totally missing the mark on terrorism? I just watched BBC America news showing biometrics in place at Dulles Airport in Washington (who’s paying for real anti-terrorism measures after $200-billion+ of our taxes is spent destroying, then rebuilding, Iraq?) as “we” try to catch up with terrorists; letter bombs exploding across the EU; and the CIA expressing near certainty of the authenticity of the latest Osama tape on al Jazeera tv (“bin Who?” says Shrub).
Now that the US is mired down up to our eyeballs to the extent we cannot extricate ourselves if we wanted to, now that we are bankrupt and need funds to fight the terrorism Bush pretended to attack with this war, and the real terrorists are running rampant globally - NOW HAVE WE LEARNED a bitter, costly lesson about presidential elections and rich spoilt underachievers? One can only hope …
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