Word: peshmerga
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...after Saddam Hussein's army had ravaged the Kurdish population of northern Iraq with chemical weapons, the dictator offered amnesty to all Kurdish soldiers who fought against him--except one. Saddam ordered his minions to hunt down Talabani, a chief of the Kurdish separatist guerrillas known as the peshmerga. If Talabani was caught, Saddam vowed, he would put him to death...
...staunchly pro-American actions. The Kurds are deeply grateful for America’s creation of the “no fly zone,” which enabled them to enjoy at least some sense of autonomy after the First Gulf War ended. The Kurd’s famed peshmerga militias played a significant part in Operation Iraqi Freedom and continue to battle against the terrorists waging a guerilla campaign...
...politically cohesive of Iraq's ethnic communities, they are led by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, two leaders who have settled their factional differences in order to present a united front in pursuit of enhanced autonomy in the new Iraq. And between them, Talabani and Barzani command 70,000 "peshmerga" militia fighters...
...Washington. President Bush, for example, rails against "illegal militias" and envisages Iraqi security forces fighting shoulder to shoulder with Americans to root them out. But "illegal militia" is a slippery and subjective category in Iraq, where every major political party has its own armed formation. The Kurdish "peshmerga" forces that fought alongside the U.S. from the beginning have been "legal" all along; the Iran-trained Badr brigade was initially regarded with hostility by the U.S. but is now recognized as an important force for stability in places such as Najaf...
...with the Iraqi people by separating itself from the U.S. The most logical way to do that would be to extend the Fallujah principle to the entire country: ask the American military to stand down and turn security over to local militias--Baathists in the Sunni triangle, the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north, the Shi'ite Badr Brigade in the south. This would be dreadful long-term policy, an open invitation to civil war. But would the Bush Administration oppose it? Possibly not, on recent evidence, especially if it produced the appearance of calm by November (as it already...