THE KURDS TO THE RESCUE???

Earlier this week, there was a report on NPR about the Kurdish soldiers who were being sent to Baghdad as part of Fredo's escalation and this could be a very bad move because there is long-standing enmity between the Arabs of Iraq and the Kurds.

From Lexis-Nexis:

Morning Edition
January 18, 2007 Thursday

(excerpts)

General ANWAR DOLANI (Iraqi National Army): (Through translator) Now there is a very bad massacre of the people of Baghdad there. Shia, Sunnis, anybody (unintelligible), we will go and defend, try to stop this kind of killings.

WATSON: Like many of soldiers here, the general is a former Pesh Merga. That's the name for Kurdish rebels who long fought against successive Arab dominated governments in Baghdad. Speaking in Kurdish, Golani says this job will not be easy.

General GOLANI: (Through translator) I think hardest challenge will be in the communication. And probably 90 percent of our soldiers do not speak Arabic.

WATSON: This deployment is extremely unpopular in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the presidents of the semi-autonomous region last year ordered all Iraqi flags to be removed and replaced by the flag of Kurdistan.

Lieutenant Colonel DENNIS CHAPMAN (U.S. Army National Guard): The public is adamantly against it up here.

WATSON: Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Chapman commands a small team of American military advisers attached to the Kurdish battalion.

Lt. Col. CHAPMAN: It's because there's a great fear of the ethnic strife down there in Baghdad, and somehow a fear of it making its way up here.

WATSON: Lt. Col. Chapman says there had been desertions, and he expects only several hundred soldiers to show up in Baghdad out of a battalion of some 1,600 troops.

WATSON: Asos Hardi, editor-in-chief of a Kurdish newspaper, fears that if the Kurds clash with Shiite Arab militias, it could spark a new conflict between Iraq's two main ethnic groups.

Mr. ASOS HARDI (Editor-in-Chief, Awene Newspaper): It could be the first ignition for the real conflict, real war between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq.

WATSON: Yesterday, at the army base, some Kurdish soldiers did not have nice things to say about their Arab countrymen.

WATSON: Why should we sacrifice ourselves for Arabs who are killing each other, said a Kurdish man here named Sadar Ahmed. The Arabs, he added, are our enemy.