« "The Welcome Suicide Truck Bombers" | Main | "Iraq: A Place of Ambivalence" »

Michael Totten embeds with the Kurdish Peshmerga:

SULEIMANIYA, IRAQ - Iraq is a country with three armies and I’m-not-sure-how-many militias and death squads. The Iraqi Army is nominally the national army, but it's still being trained, supplied, and augmented by the coalition forces, which is to say the Americans. It's also not allowed to operate in the north. The third army is the Kurdish Peshmerga, the liberators and protectors of the only part of Iraq - the three northern governates - that may be salvaged from insurgency, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and war. Do not confuse the Peshmerga with the ragtag ethnic and sectarian militias running rampant in Iraq's center and south. The Kurdish armed forces are a real professional army and are recognized as such in Iraq's constitution and by the so-called central government in Baghdad.

My colleague Patrick Lasswell and I spent a couple of days with officers and soldiers at the Ministry of Peshmerga in the northern city of Suleimaniya. I knew already that the Kurds bristled at charges that their Peshmerga was yet another of Iraq's many militias, and I have to agree now that I've seen and interviewed them myself.

Totten's work continues to impress. Read the whole thing.

Posted by Bill at April 5, 2007 10:36 AM | TrackBack (0)

Comments