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=> Are Kurds being targeted for reprisal?

Are Kurds being targeted for reprisal?
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Monday, September 20 2004, 0:40:58 (CEST)
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Are Kurds being targeted for reprisal?
Reportedly 3 Kurds labeled as "KDP party members" have been beheaded and the video posted on the web. At the same time, it is reported that 25 "Iraqi National Guard members" have also been abducted. Considering that the "Iraqi National Guard" which fought alongside US forces in Fallujah, Najaf and Tal Afar were almost completely made up of Kurdish peshmerga, it is possible that these 25 abducted Iraqis are Kurds.

After the bloody siege and assault on Fallujah, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karl Vick reported in the Washington Post:

Guerrillas coming out of Fallujah have complained bitterly that Kurdish militiamen known as pesh merga are deployed against them. The Kurds are members of the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps built from several exile-based militias that supported the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. Commanders of another, overwhelmingly Arab Iraqi arm battalion refused to fight alongside the Marines.

"Worse than pigs, thieves and tramps," read lines a poem circulating on fliers in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq where Kurds are accused of pushing Arab families off land claimed by both groups. The fliers condemned the leaders of Iraq's two Kurdish parties. It is not known who produced the fliers, which were also seen in Baghdad.

The Kurdish leaders were condemned in chanting that followed Friday prayers at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad.


"When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home," said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. "I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed."


During the attack on Najaf, London based Asharq al-Awsat reported:
An assistant to Muqtada al-Sadr, Husam al-Moosawi, yesterday threatened to attack US troops violently if they enter Najaf. He also accused Kurdish peshmerga fighters of helping the US troops. Moosawi described a barrier built by the Americans between Kufa and Najaf as a provocative step aiming at isolating the two cities. "Any American patrol in Najaf is liable to attacks because we consider this an encroachment upon the holy city. We have the right to defend ourselves, the religious authorities, and the cities," said Moosawi, who added that he had hard evidence of Peshmerga participation with US forces near Najaf. He said Peshmerga elements are in Najaf’s al-Askari quarter.
After the siege of Tal Afar, Patrick Cockburn writes:
The Americans claim that Tal Afar is a hub for militants smuggling fighters and arms into Iraq from nearby Syria. Turkish officials make clear in private they believe that the Kurds, the main ally of the US in northern Iraq, have managed to get US troops involved on their side in the simmering ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turkmen.

"The Iraqi government forces with the Americans are mainly Kurdish," complained one Turkmen source. A Turkish official simply referred to the Iraqi military units involved in the attack on Tal Afar as "peshmerga", the name traditionally given to Kurdish fighters.
[...]
There has been tension, sometimes boiling over into gun battles, between the Kurds and the Turkmens since last year. As Saddam Hussein's regime fell apart Kurdish troops, aided by the US air force, advanced to take Kirkuk and Mosul. The Kurds felt they at last had a chance to reverse 40 years of ethnic cleansing which had seen their people massacred or driven from their homes.

Both Arabs and Turkmen fear ethnic cleansing in reverse. In Tal Afar, a poor city with high unemployment, there was friction from the beginning. Days after the fall of Saddam the Kurdistan Democratic Party appointed its own mayor called Abdul Haleq in the city. He ran up a yellow Kurdish flag outside his office. He was told by local people to take it down or die. He refused and was killed the following day. His office, along with the yellow flag, was burned by an angry crowd.
This, of course, was the danger inherent in the US's use of peshmerga against Arab Iraqis, as I have tried to point out as these developments became known. The Israeli involvement in Kurdistan, as reported by Seymour Hersh, surely would not help matters.



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