Allied With U.S., Kurds Sense This Is Their Moment

Across a plain of scrub brush and mud-brick villages are the Iraqi troops that Mala Shkoor has been longing to kill. Saddam Hussein’s forces, Shkoor said, murdered his wife and six children 15 years ago, and now, with the U.S. military bunking alongside him, the Kurdish fighter wants revenge.

Shkoor commands the front line separating his lightly armed Kurdish militia from Iraqi soldiers in a desolate wedge of northern Iraq. The Kurds have manned this outpost alone for years, but U.S. Special Forces teams with computers and eavesdropping equipment now join Shkoor on night patrols.

The northern front against Hussein lacks the firepower that U.S. battalions are unleashing in Baghdad and other central Iraqi cities. Turkey’s refusal to allow American soldiers to cross its borders into northern Iraq forced the Pentagon -- with about 5,000 troops in the region instead of the 30,000 originally planned -- to rely on Kalashnikov-toting Kurdish fighters known as peshmerga, or “those who face death.”

It is not a union that the U.S. desires, but war is about reinventing strategies. The 140-mile-long front in the Kurdish-controlled autonomous north is a landscape of snowy mountains and arid plains.

Kurdish fighters and U.S. forces have successfully battled on the ground together over the last week against Islamic militants near the Iranian border and Iraqi positions near the city of Mosul.

U.S. and Kurdish military leaders started cooperating shortly after the war began last month. American troops have set up camps in recent days near the Iraqi army’s front lines, as air controllers direct bomb strikes concentrated along a highway in Iraqi-controlled territory between Mosul and Kirkuk.

U.S. transport planes arrive daily at two airstrips in northern Iraq, carrying four-wheel-drive vehicles, Humvees, antitank missiles and .50-caliber machines guns.

Shkoor watched Saturday afternoon as more than 15 U.S. all-terrain vehicles pulled into his militia’s headquarters near the Kurdish-controlled towns of Kifry and Kalak, where Special Forces units have been identifying Iraqi bunkers. More than 2,000 peshmerga have mobilized in Shkoor’s area, and Saturday night U.S. warplanes dropped at least seven bombs on Iraqi positions, said a senior Kurdish official.

“At night,” Shkoor said, “the peshmerga go forward with the Americans.”

Kurdish fighters insist that they are maintaining defensive positions and advancing only to fill a vacuum when Iraqi forces retreat under intense U.S. bombardment. Such was the case recently near Chamchamal when Kurds -- navigating minefields and abandoned barracks -- moved forward 12 miles behind withdrawing Iraqi soldiers.

The buildup of U.S. ground troops in the region, and their close coordination with Kurdish fighters, suggests a more aggressive strategy. In the northwest, they appear to be attempting to cut off Iraqi forces from oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul, the nation’s third-largest city. Kurdish officials have been urging U.S. forces to take advantage of the region’s 25,000 experienced fighters and its underground resistance movements to spark uprisings.

“America right now has no clear vision about [how to gain] control of the cities” in the region, said one senior Kurdish military official.

U.S. troops express admiration for the enthusiasm of the peshmerga. But Kurdish fighters add a troubling geopolitical dimension. Turkey is concerned that the peshmerga will use the war to declare Kurdish independence -- a move that could incite similar feelings among Turkey’s 12 million Kurds.

The Turks, who have threatened to send troops into northern Iraq, claim historical rights to Kirkuk and want a share of its oil supply. An incursion by Turkish forces could lead to fighting between Turks and Kurds, leaving the U.S. in the middle of centuries-old animosities.

Kurdish leaders are attempting to portray their autonomous enclave in northern Iraq as America’s strongest ally in a region where U.S. relations with Turkey, Iran and Syria are strained. The Kurds sense that this is their moment to step beyond a troubled history and gain a bit of international prominence.

“We will not engage in any unilateral action,” said Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which governs the eastern portion of northern Iraq. “We don’t want to jeopardize the American mission of liberating Iraq.”

The Kurds, however, are never far from their weapons.

In Pirdawd, a Kurdish backwater in the west surrounded by wheat fields and shepherds’ scattered villages, scores of Kurdish fighters gathered Saturday with at least three Russian-made antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks. The Kurds fire the guns -- the biggest in their modest arsenal -- parallel to the ground at their Iraqi enemies. Not far from the dushka teams, U.S. soldiers were setting up camp with a direct electronic link to the warplanes that have allowed Kurdish fighters to advance along several routes.

Iraqi troops have fled many bunkers along the northern front, and Kurdish fighters have rolled in, peeking over sandbags and raising their flags. Sometimes the Iraqis don’t leave their positions. After three days of ground battles and airstrikes, the Iraqis held the town of Ghazar on Saturday. Kurdish fighters reached a ridge above, near the highway to Mosul, only to retreat under a counterattack.

A heavyset man with a mustache who wore sneakers instead of army boots, Shkoor walked up a rocky hill and looked across the plain. Sun and dust made haze of the villages, and Shkoor pointed to two trees in the distance. They were Iraqi positions, he said, in the village of Bawa Mahmood.

He knew the wrinkles, the creases in the hills, the strands of dirt roads. His American counterparts have “global positioning” gadgets, radar and tiny computers to tell them things. Shkoor uses his eyes, the sight on his Kalashnikov and the crudely drawn maps of minefields. He navigates by experience and by hate.

“Saddam Hussein,” he said, “killed my wife and my six children.”