Word: peshmerga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Federalism, the role of Islam and women's rights are still - after months of negotiations - key sticking points. The Kurds are demanding a loose federation designed to keep their ?peshmerga? militia and the autonomy they've enjoyed in their territory for the past 14 years. They're also demanding final status talks on the city of Kirkuk, which they claim as a Kurdish city, but which was ?Arabized? under Saddam Hussein. The Sunni Arabs are pushing back against the Kurdish claims on Kirkuk and Shi'ite demands for a similar autonomous region in the south. Sunni negotiators oppose federalism because...
...have enjoyed for over a decade under the protection of the Allied ?no-fly? zone, but also that their domain be extended to include the fiercely contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk. They want a greater share of oil revenues, and also insist on keeping their ethnic militia - the peshmerga - intact, simply incorporating it under the umbrella of the Iraqi national army but making it the de facto defense force of the Kurdish region, into which no other national army units would be allowed to enter. In essence, the Kurds are naming as their price for cooperation the right...
...parlaying their kingmaker role into a series of autonomy guarantees to be written down even before the new parliament has convened, the risk of breakdown in the system grows. Conceding to Kurdish demands on Kirkuk, for example, will further alienate the Sunni population of northern Iraq. Also, if the peshmerga are maintained on the terms demanded by the Kurdish leaders, it will inevitably be more difficult to persuade other factions to disarm their own militias. The Sunnis may not currently have significant representation in the political process, but a significant segment of the community is represented on the battlefield...
...more secular form of government than most Shi'ites do. The Kurdistan Referendum Movement, a grass-roots organization of intellectuals and junior political officials, says that of the 2 million who took part in an informal Election Day referendum on independence, 99% voted in favor. Kurds control their peshmerga militia soldiers and their own borders and are determined to preserve their sanctuary. Officially, Kurdistan exists only north of the "green line," the area where U.S. forces halted the Iraqi army's advance when Saddam moved to crush yet another Kurdish uprising in 1991. But since the fall of Saddam...
...commanders in Iraq, an even more pressing concern is the status of the 80,000-strong peshmerga. In insurgent hot spots like Mosul, U.S. commanders have praised Kurdish troops for their willingness to stand and fight. But the peshmerga's continued assaults on insurgents run the risk of exacerbating tribal rivalries and sparking an anti-Kurdish backlash by Iraq's Arabs. The U.S. hopes to defuse the potential for conflict by folding the peshmerga into a new, unified Iraqi army. But the Kurds have so far refused to place their soldiers under the command of Baghdad. "The peshmerga must remain...