Knight Ridder Report: Iraqi Unity Not 'Gaining Traction'

By: Greg Mitchell After five days of interviews with Kurdish leader and troops in northern Iraq, Tom Lasseter, longtime reporter in Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau, reveals today that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army "aren't gaining traction."

Indeed, he reports, Kurdish leaders have placed more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions "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."

Will this happen? Lasseter related that many of the Kurd leaders find it "inevitable," as Iraqi fragments, troops, and officials set out to protect or seize what they consider their ethnic and religious regions.

''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 as he escorted Lasseter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours.''

The Kurds, of course, are mainly secular Sunni Muslims, ethnically distinct from Arabs.

Just weeks ago, Lasseter, after accompanying Shiite troops on missions to the south, revealed that this group, too, has 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. Some spoke openly about taking bloody revenge on Sunnis after Americans pull back.

Now Lasseter writes: "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."

But 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, ''Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs. If we can resolve this by talking, fine, but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting.''