Word: peshmerga
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...almost every case, after talk of brotherhood came talk of war. Over tea in a small Iraqi Army station in Wana, a gray town on the northern outskirts of town, I watched Kurdish Peshmerga and U.S. Infantry officers discuss the continuing insurgency efforts with the Iraqi Army. "We are one army. But even if you gave millions of dollars to this area, there would still be problems here," said Walleed Rasheed, a member of the Peshmerga who identified himself simply as a soldier. "When the U.S. Army leaves this area, the terrorists will kill a lot of people." The officer...
...media," says Fryad Rwandzi, a Kurdish member of parliament and spokesman for the 58-strong Kurdish bloc in the national parliament. "We, as Kurds, have the authority to defend our people; 172,000 Kurdish people were driven away from Mosul [during Saddam's Arabization period]. [The peshmerga] are to protect the Kurdish people." (Read a TIME story about Kurdistan...
...very wrong very quickly. Last summer, Iraqi security forces and peshmerga almost came to blows in the disputed area of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, after Iraqi troops tried to enter the mixed town. There are dozens of similarly contested zones in Nineveh. "It would be an ugly fight," says Colonel Brian Vines, the U.S. Army liaison to the Nineveh Operations Command, which oversees the province's local and national police as well as army units. "I think that in some places they're going to have to forcibly move [Kurds] out of these disputed zones...
...type of people whom Rasheed and Capt. Afar told me they were worried about - Sunni Nationalists, members of the former regime, officers in the Iraqi Army - also told me that they and the Peshmerga are unified. "We are one army," Col. Ali of east Mosul's 1st Brigade told me. "But," he added, in contradiction, "the Pesh is a militia...
...these men, Peshmerga and the Sons of Iraq, the Kurds and Arabs alike, are technically members of the same national security force, with which the American military is trying to work closely. Back in the hallway with Ricky and the shaving medic, I thought about this as I interviewed an Arab soldier watching the proceedings. Pvt. Faisal told me that there would be no problems with the Kurds - "as long as they stayed in Kurdistan" - and that he was happy to see the U.S. leave...