Ready and Willing, but Are They Able?

At an abandoned Iraqi army base beneath the voluptuous brown mountains of Kurdistan, the rhythmic sounds of thudding boots and military chants echo through the morning air. The only armed force in Iraq not under Saddam Hussein’s control is running daily drills.

“Hut-hut! Long live Kurdistan! Hut-hut! Long live the martyrdom of the peshmerga!” shout the troops as they jog in tight formation. Other squads nearby train as snipers, on rocket launchers and, at a feverish pace, on obstacle courses.

After decades of fighting, the legendary peshmerga, or “those who face death,” are gearing up for what many here hope will be their last big battle: ousting a regime that has victimized the Kurdish people perhaps more than any other group in Iraq.

Many eagerly await American troops in hopes that, together, the world’s most powerful military and Iraq’s most experienced opposition force can finish the job the guerrillas started in the 1970s.

“It will be my utmost joy if the Americans come. I’m ready to help them. We all are,” said Wahab Mustafa Ismail, a 30-year-old former mechanic who now serves in an elite unit.

But the big question here is what role the peshmerga will play -- and whether the rugged Kurdish force will get to participate at all.

Kurdistan, the northern Iraqi enclave that borders Turkey, is only one of the routes the U.S. military might use if it ends up launching a land invasion against Hussein’s regime. Many of the roughly 50,000 Kurdish fighters, with another 50,000 part-time volunteers, yearn to play the same role in Iraq that the Northern Alliance played alongside U.S. troops in ending the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.

“We are more effective, more organized and better trained than the Northern Alliance and we’re familiar with the Iraqi army. Many of our members are defectors,” said Mustafa Said Khadir, a top peshmerga commander for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two political parties that administer the north.

“The Americans can’t do it without us,” he added. “Or at least it’d be easier [with us]. The U.S. needs the peshmerga as a force familiar with the terrain that can help liberate [the cities of] Kirkuk, Mosul and then Baghdad.”

The ethnic Kurds deride Pentagon plans to train an Iraqi opposition force of as many as 10,000 fighters, most of them exiles. The move is late in the game, they say, and the peshmerga already have the required experience.

“If the United States helps the real opposition with its air force and some special forces, it won’t need to send a large army. It doesn’t need to send so many of its sons to die in Iraq,” Jalal Talabani, the affable leader of the PUK said in an interview.

However, both U.S. and Kurdish officials concede the situation isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem. From explosive regional political issues to the practical realities of military cooperation, using the Kurdish fighters is fraught with problems.

Although the Kurds have been gradually retraining their guerrilla force to form a conventional army, they still don’t have enough bullets for the sniper team to practice.

The squads learn the principles of operating their dated Russian rifles outfitted with scopes. They practice subterfuge, hiding for hours wrapped head-to-toe in camouflage in the mountain flora. And they take aim.

But they don’t shoot.

“We’re not like the United States. Bullets are precious. We don’t make them here, so these men only get to shoot occasionally,” said Maj. Simko Nazim, commander of the peshmerga expeditionary battalion.

The Kurds have limited firepower and no air force. Most of their vintage equipment has been captured in encounters with Iraqi troops, bought on the black market or even cajoled for a price off poor, bored or sympathetic Iraqi sentries at the demarcation posts between Kurdistan and the rest of the country.

Russian rifles and machine guns were bought years ago from Iran and a few artillery pieces smuggled through Turkey, Kurdish commanders say.

So the PUK and Kurdistan Democratic Party, the other major Kurdish group in the north, have what it takes to fight a guerrilla war on their own turf -- as they did with some impact against Iraq’s army in 1995 -- or against each other in 1996 in clashes that rent Kurdistan into rival sectors for two years.

“The peshmerga do have a competent and credible infantry force and they can defend in the right terrain. But to ask them to operate in areas outside Kurdistan is well beyond their capabilities,” said a senior Bush administration official.

Added a Western diplomat in Turkey: “These guys are not an army. We’re thinking of using them as Apache scouts” to help U.S. and allied forces navigate the terrain and spot Iraqi forces.

But on their own, the guerrillas are no match against the 500,000-member Iraqi army, the Arab world’s most powerful and best-equipped force, if the goal is to sweep into Baghdad.

“With the equipment we have, we can’t fight the Iraqi army. We could stop them from [entering] Sulaymaniyah for no more than 48 hours,” Khadir conceded. “Our main advantage is bravery and morale,” he said.

Most of the Kurdish fighters have a story to tell about signing up. Shorsh Mustafa Mohammed, a sweet-faced youth who joined at 14, lost most of his relatives in the village of Goptapa during Hussein’s Anfal operation in 1988, when more than 4,500 Kurdish villages were razed and tens of thousands of Kurds were rounded up and either disappeared or were executed. “They even took the women,” Mohammed said bitterly.

Ibrahim Aziz Biez was among more than 1 million Kurds who fled for the mountain borders with Iran and Turkey in 1991 after an uprising, urged by then-President George Bush, was brutally quashed by Hussein’s forces. Biez returned only after the U.S. and Britain imposed a “no-fly” zone over the north, backed by air patrols. Then he joined the peshmerga.

Many of the fighters lost relatives or friends when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the 1980s, most infamously at the town of Halabja, where about 5,000 men, women and children died gruesome deaths.

To upgrade the Kurds’ capabilities, they would need, at least, ammunition, communications equipment and logistical supplies, said Gen. Simko Dizayee, head of the peshmerga general staff, who still wears the Kurds’ traditional baggy pants as part of his uniform.

The wish list, however, is much longer.

Yet providing Kurdish troops with anything more than the aged artillery, rockets and mortars they have could unleash a regional backlash -- and potentially even intervention from other countries. Turkey, which may prove to be the most pivotal partner for any U.S.-led attack on Iraq, deeply fears the postwar existence of a well-equipped Kurdish force and the potential spill over to its own restive Kurds.

Kurds, a non-Arab people estimated to number between 25 million and 30 million, are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state. They span Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, and the dream of many Kurds is creation of a formal homeland -- as they were promised after the Ottoman Empire collapsed eight decades ago. In the meantime, they hope to begin by liberating Kirkuk, the oil-rich center of Kurdish culture.

Turkey is sufficiently alarmed at the prospect of both a well-armed Kurdish army and the Kurds’ capture of Kirkuk, home also to thousands of ethnic Turkomans, that it has hinted that it might intervene to block both developments. The danger of a military operation in Iraq becoming a regional war has led the Pentagon to make plans for U.S. troops to take and hold Kirkuk early in any campaign. Then the Kurds would simply defend the turf they now hold.

The Kurds still have much to offer any U.S. offensive -- including more than 100 defectors from the Iraqi army now in their force.

Col. Weria Hassan fought U.S. troops near the port city of Basra during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “Before, I lived in Baghdad, and like many Iraqi troops I had no choice. My family was there and it was my livelihood. I was forced to fight the Americans,” he recalled. But as a Kurd, Hassan said, he never liked fighting for Hussein.

So in 1998, Hassan sent his family here to Sulaymaniyah, his wife’s northern hometown. She carried a message to the peshmerga that her husband wanted to defect.

The next day, Hassan walked almost 10 hours through the no man’s land used by smugglers from Iraqi territory to a Kurdish-held area.

Now Hassan is one of the top officers running the Kurds’ formal army. He wants to fight alongside the Americans -- “or anyone else who will come to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and free Kurdistan.”

As pressure mounts on Hussein, several Kurdish commanders said they are hearing from an increasing number of Iraqi officers, all the way to the top, who want to defect. “They’re still coming across,” Hassan said. “The morale of the Iraqi army right now is very low.”

But the peshmerga said they are urging many Iraqi officers to remain in place -- for now. In the event of a U.S.-led attack, some may be of more use preventing their troops from fighting or leading mass defections. They think even Hussein’s Republican Guard will be fairly easy to crack.

“Iraq isn’t the almighty army that the U.S. believes it is,” Dizayee said. “It’s a highly institutionalized army, which makes it vulnerable. Once its command and control centers and the communications network have been hit, the officers won’t know what to do next. They’re not allowed to operate themselves.

“The troops will collapse and surrender,” he said. “That’s again when the United States will need us.”