Kurdish troops prepare for deployment in Baghdad

The Los Angeles Times cites similar concerns not only among Kurds living in Baghdad, but also the city's Sunnis and Shiites.

"I advise the Kurdish people to apply pressure on their leaders to prevent this step," said Mohammed Daini, a lawmaker with a major Sunni bloc. Kurdish forces, he said, "will face firm resistance from both the Sunnis and the Shiites."

Sheik Abdul Razzaq Naddawi, an aide to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, agreed that Kurdish troops would not be welcome.

"The Kurds, frankly speaking, consider themselves superior to other Iraqis," he said. "Would they allow troops from the middle or the south to arrive in Kurdistan?" he asked. "Their borders are closed, and they are practically independent."

Because of that "independence," The Washington Post reports, some US officials also have reservations about the use of Kurdish troops in Baghdad.

Former U.S. ambassador Peter W. Galbraith, who has helped Kurdish officials in the post-Saddam Hussein period, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday that the Kurdish fighters "are ultimately loyal not to the national chain of command or the nominal chain of command, but to their political party leaders" -- in this case, to the regional government.

At a hearing Friday of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the deployment of the Kurds in Baghdad could bring "balance in that they are not either for Sunnis or for Shia but for Iraq." But Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) countered, "I think they are for the Kurds."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argues however that the Kurds' drive for independence is one of the motivations behind President Bush's call for a troop surge in Iraq to ensure the nation's stability, reports the Turkish Daily News. Were Iraq to fragment, she says, an independent Kurdish state might cause upheaval in neighboring Turkey, which has its own problems with Kurds seeking independence.

"Do you want to drive Turkey again to be concerned about a Kurdish north, one that would most certainly have to make different decisions than the Kurds have courageously made decisions now to be a part of a unified Iraq?" she asked the dissenting lawmakers.

"As Iraq falls apart, they're (Kurds) going to have to make different decisions, and that's going to be a problem with Turkey," Rice said. "Is that the Iraq you want to create?"

But some critics say that sending Kurdish troops to Baghdad may in fact help create the fractured Iraq that Ms. Rice fears. Independent journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer writes in a commentary for The Brooks Bulletin of Canada that "If the Kurdish brigades that are being brought south to Baghdad are sent into battle against the [Mahdi] Army, it could trigger yet another civil war in Iraq, this time along the ragged ethnic frontier in the north between Arabs and Kurds." And an editorial in Vermont's Rutland Herald says that pitting "Iraq's Kurds against the restive Sunni and Shiite Arabs, on behalf of a Shiite-dominated government, promises to complicate already complex sectarian divisions within the country."

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