27
Kurdish militiamen were able to “capture Iraq’s third-largest city, defeat six Iraqi
divisions, capture 600 and killed 859 enemy soldiers, and seize 6,000 square kilometers
of territory.”
78
As elsewhere in Iraq, Kurdish cities began to descend into chaos due to the
security vacuum that was created by the defeat of the Iraqi Army. However,
the Special
Forces recognized the impending disaster and the Kurdish Peshmerga was the only
security apparatus available able to suppress angry crowds and looters until they were
able to hand over operational control to the 101
st
Airborne Division led by Major General
Petraeus.
79
However, there was a brief period during which the 101
st
was unwilling to
engage the Peshmerga, which showed how quickly an area not controlled by the
Peshmerga could descend into chaos. Immediately after the 101
st
arrived
into Northern
Iraq, they began to limit Peshmerga authority by confiscating their weapons, which
enabled insurgents and criminals to reorganize and recover from the recent success of the
joint Peshmerga-SF operations. This was followed by the re-eviction of Kurdish families
from their ancestral homes, which had been taken from them during Saddam’s
Arabization policy in the 1990’s, and to which they had recently returned. Lastly, the
U.S. endorsed the establishment of a Kurdish army battalion under the leadership of
former Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi consisting of soldiers that
did not participate in the
successful joint Kurdish-SF battles against Iraqi Army units. This caused many of the
loyal Kurdish militia members to abandon their Peshmerga units in an effort to benefit
financially from salaries to be paid to the new battalion, leaving some militias in a
significantly weakened state and unable to protect northern cities like Mosul against a
growing insurgency. The army battalion, meanwhile, never
amounted to a substantial
force and was slowly dissolved into obscurity for two reasons. First, many of the soldiers
were later arrested by U.S. forces after “they were found looting abandoned homes of
former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” while they were still in uniform and
when they were supposed to be supporting U.S. troops with security immediately after
78
78
Linda Robinson,
Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces
, 1st ed. (New
York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 340.
79
Robinson, 340.
28
the fall the Baath party.
80
Second, less than a year after Chalabi
was brought in by the
White House and Pentagon as a contender for the post-invasion presidency of Iraq, he
was abandoned by the U.S. due to accusations that he was “passing classified information
to Iran and money laundering in Iraq.”
81
The sudden change in U.S. strategy to non-
engagement of the Kurdish militias resulted in an increasingly hostile population, and a
weakened militia unable to combat a growing insurgency, which left U.S.
forces fighting
alone. Many U.S. soldiers who had been working with the Peshmerga were shocked.
One captured the general sentiment: “The Kurds bled with us. They died in this war, for
our cause. They are our comrades. They know this city. They know Mosul. Good God,
they know all northern Iraq…our Commanding general gave them the boot.”
82
The 101
st
soon recognized the need to modify its strategy because the Kurds “felt slighted that –
despite their demonstrated loyalty to the coalition forces they had received only a minor
allocation of reconstruction funds.”
83
MG Petraeus soon reversed course, ensuring that
the 101
st
would continue the strategy of engagement fostered by the Special Forces by
augmenting the Peshmerga with “two engineer battalions to expand airfields, and help the
Kurds
train and equip border guards, train civil defense forces, rebuild schools, and
complete various water projects.”
84
Engagement with the Peshmerga continued to serve as a coherent U.S. military
strategy after the fall of Saddam, producing one of the few examples of stability during a
chaotic period. Once installed, the interim Iraqi government also recognized the benefits
of employing the Kurdish militias. They were immediately
called upon to serve as
border guards and fill major security voids on the Iraq-Iran border in August 2003.
Additionally the U.S. would benefit by immediately employing the Kurdish militias to
80
“Chalabi Backers Arrested for Looting,” Toronto Star,
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0423-06.htm (accessed December 9, 2007).
81
Peyman Pejman, “Iraq: Chalabi Says U.S. Organization may be Behind Attacks,” Radio Free
Europe-Radio Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/09/d022f9bb-e515-4f17-a002-
043357467345.html (accessed December 9, 2007).
82
Richard Andres, “The Afghan Model in Northern Iraq,”
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