Remember that a major part of Bush’s (new) plan, is that the Iraqi army has to be able to take over, ASAP? Kurds disagree. In short: they seem to be deserting en masse since the Iraqi government announced that it plans on sending Kurdish army brigades to Baghdad. The main problem is that (deserted) Kurds don’t consider the sectarian violence to be their battle. There is also the problem of language and the Kurds are afraid that, if they go to Baghdad to fight, they will be singled out by both the Sunni and Shiite militias.
“The soldiers don’t know the Arabic language, the Arab tradition, and they don’t have any experience fighting terror,” said Anwar Dolani, a former peshmerga commander who leads the brigade that’s being transferred to Baghdad from the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.
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“I joined the army to be a soldier in my homeland, among my people. Not to fight for others who I have nothing to do with,” said Ameen Kareem, 38, who took a week’s leave with other soldiers from his brigade in Irbil and never returned. “I used to fight in the mountains and valleys, not in the streets.”Kareem said he knew that deserting was risky, but he said he’d rather be behind bars in Kurdistan than a “soldier in Baghdad’s fire.” Without the language and with his Kurdish features, he was sure he would stand out, he said. He’s a Kurd, he said, and he has no reason to become a target in an Arab war.
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Farman Mohammed, 42, celebrated the Muslim Eid holiday with his family last month and didn’t go back when he heard that he might be deployed to Baghdad. Afraid for his life, he found a new job and settled in with his family.“The fanatic Sunnis in Baghdad kill the Shiites, and vice versa. Both of them are outraged against the Kurds. They will not hesitate to kill us and accuse us of being collaborators with the occupiers,” he said. “How can we face them alone?”
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Mohammed Abdoul, 41, reluctantly prepared to leave for the Iraqi capital earlier this week. Fear clouded his mind.“I don’t know why we should interfere in this Sunni-Shiite war,” he said. “If I am going to face a difficult task in Baghdad and feel sectarian tension, I will leave the army forever, come back to Sulaimaniyah and work in the market.”
The Kurds express some valid concerns; why – for instance – doesn’t the Iraqi government sent Kurdish brigades that actually speak Arabic and isn’t the danger very realy that, indeed, Kurdish soldiers will be singled out and won’t Shiites and Sunnis turn against the Kurds in general? Kurdistan is now (relatively) safe.
However, although some of their concerns might be understandable, those concerns became irrelevant at the moment they became soldiers of the Iraqi army. If they strictly wanted to defend Kurdistan, they should have signed up for some kind of Kurdish army, for a militia, or they should have ‘normal’ jobs. What they should not have done, is signing up for the Iraqi army and then deserting at the moment they actually have to fight. Once they became soldiers of Iraq, they should have been loyal to Iraq first. Kurdistan second.
Kurds focus on Kurds first. They make up good soldiers as long as they are directly fighting for their own people / part of the country. But once it is expected of them to defend the entire country, also those who are not Kurds, quite some of them bail.
Theorizing aside, this also represents yet another big problem in the Iraq war: one of the ideas behind Bush’s plans is that the Iraqi army will take over from the U.S. soon. The idea is that the Iraqi army will be the one who truly puts an end to the sectarian violence, at least in the long run. All articles I’ve read lately imply one thing quite clearly: no matter what al-Maliki thinks of it, the Iraqi army is not able to do something against the violence that’s tearing the country apart, and it’s quite likely that it will not be able to do so for quite some time to come.
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