For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched US President Barack Obama’s administration to let them buy US-made weapons and for just as long, Washington has rebuffed its closest allies in Iraq.
US officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some to the Kurds.
The minority’s peaceful, semi-autonomous northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan has been the lone success story to come out of the US’ 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Photo: Reuters
Washington has resisted arming the Kurds because its aim is to keep Iraq united. A strong Kurdish army could hasten independence for the ethnic group.
Now, the Islamic State extremists, which some US officials have branded “a terrorist army,” have overpowered lightly armed Kurdish units, threatening Iraqi Kurdistan and the US personnel stationed there.
Obama on Saturday said the US had increased military aid to the Kurds, but did not elaborate. White House officials on Friday said that Baghdad had sent the Kurds some weapons, a first after years of ill relations between the ethnic group and the central Iraqi government.
Photo: AFP
“The United States and the Iraqi government have stepped up our military assistance to Kurdish forces as they wage their fight,” Obama said.
Among the 300 military advisers that the Pentagon sent to Iraq in June, dozens are operating out of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is now within 40km of fighters from the Islamic State.
In a bitter irony, the extremists used US armored vehicles and weapons they had seized from the Iraqi military to defeat Kurdish fighters who were blocked from acquiring just such equipment, US and Kurdish officials said.
Washington sought to halt the extremists’ advance toward Erbil with airstrikes, but Kurdish officials also say the US has promised to begin sending them arms. Pentagon officials say their policy has not changed — they will only sell arms to Baghdad.
That raises the question of whether the CIA has begun providing weapons to the Kurds in secret, something US officials will neither confirm nor deny. The CIA declined to comment on whether it was sending arms.
Yet regardless of whether a covert program is underway, a growing number of voices are calling for the US to begin openly and speedily arming the Kurds.
“If Baghdad isn’t supplying the Kurds with the weapons that they need, we should provide them directly to the Kurds,” said Representative Adam Schiff, who serves on the US House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence.
“The only way to confront this threat is to arm Iraqi security forces and Kurdish forces, and yet we’re doing nothing to support either one of those,” said retired US General Michael Barbero, who used to run the mission training the Iraqi military. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s an existential threat, so why are we not in there at least equipping and arming them?”
Iraqi Kurdistan Washington-based spokesman Karwan Zebari said in an interview on Friday that US officials have assured him guns and ammunition are forthcoming.
“Last night, they said: ‘We will be moving expediently with providing you some military assets,’” he said.
The US has not wanted to stoke the Kurds’ desire for and Baghdad’s fear of an independent Kurdish state. Officials tried to steer some of the military aid it has given the Iraqi government to the Kurds, but al-Maliki did not cooperate.
Under the Pentagon’s foreign military sales program, about US$200 million worth of US weapons that was supposed to be earmarked for the Kurds by the al-Maliki government was never delivered to them, Barbero said.
“This policy of one Iraq, everything goes through Baghdad, ignores the reality on the ground,” Barbero said in an interview.
Zebari and Barbero said Kurdish forces have been outgunned by Islamic State forces driving armored US Humvees and firing US machine guns seized from the Iraqi army.
“It’s not that the peshmerga forces are scared or not willing to fight,” Zebari said, a name meaning “those who confront death” given to Kurdish militia. “They are coming at us with armored Humvees and we’re throwing these AK-47 bullets at them. It does not do anything. At some point, you run out of bullets.”
The Kurds have some tanks and armored vehicles, but not in Sinjar, a city far from the Kurdish seats of power in Erbil and Suliminiya. Sinjar fell swiftly under an onslaught from Islamic State fighters, leading thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority to flee to a mountaintop, where the US has airdropped supplies to stave off deaths from hunger and thirst.
Many of the peshmerga soldiers defending Sinjar had just six magazines of ammunition, said a former CIA official with close ties to the region who spoke on condition of anonymity.
US airstrikes are not “the endgame,” Zebari said. “What has changed for the peshmerga on the ground? Nothing. We still need that military equipment.”
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