Knight Ridder Report: Iraqi Unity Not 'Gaining Traction'

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Knight Ridder Report: Iraqi Unity Not 'Gaining Traction'

NEW YORK After five days of interviews with Kurdish leader and troops in northern Iraq, Tom Lasseter, longtime reporter in Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau, reveals today that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army "aren't gaining traction."

Indeed, he reports, Kurdish leaders have placed more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions "to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan."

Will this happen? Lasseter related that many of the Kurd leaders find it "inevitable," as Iraqi fragments, troops, and officials set out to protect or seize what they consider their ethnic and religious regions.

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The Kurds, of course, are mainly secular Sunni Muslims, ethnically distinct from Arabs.

Just weeks ago, Lasseter, after accompanying Shiite troops on missions to the south, revealed that this group, too, has stocked Iraqi army and police units with members of their own militias and have maintained a separate militia presence throughout Iraq's central and southern provinces. Some spoke openly about taking bloody revenge on Sunnis after Americans pull back.