Word: peshmerga
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...officers in Diyala have spent weeks mediating between Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi military over security arrangements for next week's provincial elections. The national army had planned to set up security checkpoints in northern Diyala, just as they will do all over the country on polling day. But the Kurds were furious. While ethnically mixed Diyala is under the jurisdiction of Baghdad, the province's northern section is predominantly Kurdish and falls along the fuzzy but increasingly agitated fault line that separates the Kurdish north from the rest of Iraq. The Kurds complained that the Iraqi army might...
...1980s, when his regime murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands more, resettling the territory with Iraqi Arabs from further south. After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. protected a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, and after the 2003 invasion, the Peshmerga moved down to take control of parts of Diyala, Nineveh and oil-rich Kirkuk, all of which they claim as historically Kurdish. Iraq's new constitution promised that the future status of those areas would be settled in a referendum, after a census had been held. But the census and the referendum...
...against Saddam, tens of thousands of families were streaming in from Kurdistan, all claiming to be returning natives. Many took refuge in or around the city's giant soccer stadium, expecting to be resettled soon. Protecting the shantytowns were the Kurdish militias known as the peshmerga, who had fought alongside the U.S. against Saddam. As loyal allies, the Kurds were demanding that the U.S. hand over Kirkuk...
...increasingly isolated on the domestic political scene in recent weeks, upsetting friends and foes alike. He has antagonized his Kurdish allies in the ruling coalition by threatening to march Iraqi security forces into Khanaqin, an ethnically mixed town just outside the autonomous region of Kurdistan, currently controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The Sunni Awakening leaders who played a key role in tamping down al-Qaeda are also growing increasingly wary of what they fear are al-Maliki's plans to sideline them, raising the specter of renewed sectarian tension. And the Prime Minister remains at odds with Shi'ite opponents...
...same time, Iraq's Kurdish leaders have been unwilling to move against the PKK, having tried and failed to defeat them during the 1990s. Instead, they have urged Turkey to seek a political solution to the conflict through peace talks and amnesty. And they're readying their own peshmerga militias to resist Turkey's incursion if they deem that their own people and territory are under attack...