Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq 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.
Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops who are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.
Remember, people, the Kurds have been probably the single most cooperative group in this whole conflict. I think this shows pretty well how well our efforts to bring about a peaceful, democratic Iraq are going. This, of course, must be tempered by the counter-evidence of the elections (and vice versa), but then again, I dunno about you but I still haven't figured out just what the impact of those elections is.
No comments:
Post a Comment