Posted on 04/11/2003 4:29:07 PM PDT by MadIvan
KURDISH authorities in newly-liberated Kirkuk yesterday secured their regained territory with American forces, effectively marginalising the Turkish threat while maintaining their own power base in the city and all but halting civil unrest.
Looting and violence had already stopped as US troops from the 173rd Airborne Division deployed around key Kirkuk installations including the oilfields and airport on Thursday night, halted by police units from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) who entered the city behind special peshmerga teams with the task of with securing hospitals, communication and business centres.
We made a plan for the taking of Kirkuk over two months ago, said Colonel Khatab Omar, head of a 400 PUK police unit. We knew we had to step in quickly behind the Iraqi Army or else the situation would degenerate and we would lose the city infrastructure to looters. The courts should be back up and running here in three days. By next week the situation should have returned to normal.
Colonel Khatab has good reason to sound smug. In contrast to other urban areas in Iraq, which have collapsed into anarchy, Kirkuk yesterday shone as a solitary example of fast postwar recovery. Though a few incidents of arson and looting continued and shops have yet to open, the hospitals functioned, electricity and water supplies were intact and traffic police controlled the roads.
His political masters have even greater reason for self-congratulation. In a takeover worthy of a Hollywood script, the PUK duped the Americans, played off the Turks and walked over the Iraqis.
The peshmerga leadership consistently assured Washington that it would not send its forces into Kirkuk for fear of antagonising the Turks. Yet it knew that it had to achieve a de facto control of Kirkuk, and neutralise the Turkish threat. So it orchestrated a spontaneous mini-uprising to coincide with the Thursday retreat of Iraqi units.
We never planned to enter Kirkuk, insisted Mam Rostam, a leading peshmerga commander, with flagrant disregard for the truth. But we had to respond when the Iraqis fled and the people in then city took control of it themselves.
Yesterday afternoon phase two of the sting was completed, as Kurdish political and military leaders graciously agreed to withdraw their peshmerga from the city, and hand over control to the American forces. In return the ploy keeps all but 15 Turkish military observers, attached to the US troops, out of the game, but preserves Kurdish control of Kirkuk.
We said on Thursday that we would withdraw our peshmerga as soon as the Americans were ready for a hand-over, said Mustafa Chalawea, personal representative to Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, as he waited to finalise the deal with US commanders at the governors office in Kirkuk. But our civil administration will remain here now, as will PUK security forces such as police. Its not a Turkish plan, its our plan with the Americans.
Critically, there has so far been no evidence of the anticipated wave of revenge attacks on the citys Arab minority. Fewer than 20 people were killed in Thursdays takeover of the city, most of them looters, and only five were reported killed yesterday.
There are two reasons for the lack of vengeance killings, said Colonel Khatab. First, this was never an ethnic problem: Kurds hated the Baath regime, not the Arab community. Secondly, almost everyone connected with the Baath Party fled Kirkuk days ago.
Lying in a hospital bed, treated by Kurdish and Arab doctors, Ali Hussein Lafta, 21, exemplified the Kurds apparent laissez-faire attitude to recent history. A Shia soldier from Amarah in southern Iraq, together with four comrades, he fled his bunker on the front north of Kirkuk on Thursday morning after noticing that his officers had disappeared.
The five men ran more than two miles back towards Kirkuk, until an armed Kurdish civilian opened fire, wounding Lafta and another soldier.
As I fell a crowd of Kurdish men swarmed around me, most with guns, he recalled. But they didnt beat me. Instead they slapped and insulted the man who had shot me.
Two of them then took me in a car to the hospital with my friends. They gave me new clothes and were very good to us.
Ha ha ha yeah. You guys were wishing you would have an opportunity to gloat about how dumb the Kurds were, how they screwed everything up by taking Kirkuk and launching a wave of violence and disorder in the region. Too bad ya didn't get your way, huh?
Like the Germans and the Russians, the Turks bet on the wrong horse.
I agree and am glad to see the Kurds take the initiative. I'm sure that GW was and is well aware of the situation on the ground. As for the Turks,...put some ice on it.
I expect that Bush and Co. have a much better grasp of Intel than anyone since Franklin and Churchill.
And Psyops.
So the people in Bhagdad (and some other places) looted.
This is allowable. It lets them blow off a little bit of that pent-up steam that the regime built up in them.
I have been talking to a Kurd (from Turkey) today. He is very cautious. He does not want a Turk backlash.
However, the fact is that the Coalition now has rights in the former Iraq.
If it was up to me I would call the lower two thirds of Iraq, Iraq.
The 'Northern No-Fly Zone' would be Kurdistan, on the sole condition that the Kurds go there, and not try to take anymore territory, if they did, MOAB.
Unfortunately for you, it won't be Turkey.
puke puke puke
gobble gobble gobble
Well, since this is between the Turks and the Kurds, I hope y'all can become human enough to keep from butchering each other.
Or is your veiled threat directed at America?
Don't be so sure that what Turk2 was trying to convey does not have merit.
From my limited studies, 20th century Kurds have been described as secular anarchists. They are not tribal or even clanish but rather hold their loyalty to members of their immediate families. Because they were the outcasts of the region oft described as "Kurdistan" they have freqenlty resorted to theivery as a means of support. Their recent campaign in Turkey, to break the backs of their Turkish oppressors, has oft times victimized their own with a cruelty usually reserved for enemies.
If this group can mature along the way then all in the region are the better for it. If, absent the enviornment of oppression, they fall back to the historic behavior they have exhibited in Turkey, Iran and Iraq then Turk2 may be right.
I don't think the Kurds and the Shiites have particularly bad feelings, historically speaking, between them. I predict the future government of Iraq will be a coalition between the Kurds and the Shiites, with the "rights" of the Sunni minority at least theoretically protected. We'll see I guess. If the Sunnis don't like that, they can move to Syria or Saudi Arabia.
I am impressed with the Kurds. I believe they see their greatest potential in a unified civil Iraq. I believe they may prove themselves over time to be a strong, unifying force in the New Free Iraq and a key ally beyond the borders of the new republic.
Time will tell...
That implies that their is no environment of oppression for them in Turkey and Iran, which is clearly not the case. Some of them are pretty bad ass it's true, but then so were the likes of the "Swamp Fox", the Green Moutain Boys and others suffering under British (and New Yorker) oppression in the late 18th century. Oppression continued over generations bends peoples minds, and they can take some time to unbend, even after throwing off that oppression.
Yesterday I read how the Kurds treated Iraqi POW's, with kindness and compassion, and I was so proud of them. These are a great people and they show that democracy CAN work in that part of the world.
You bet they won't.
Turkey's historic oppression of their ethnic minorities has much to do with the problem at hand.
Some on this forum, beyond ethnic Turks, have a great deal of trouble recognizing the acusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing lodged against the Turkish government by it's ethnic minorities.
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