A Third Mountain

[posted by Callimachus]

“In the past we had only God and the mountains as friends. But now we want Americans to support us in all matters, to be another mountain." [Colonel Mudhafer Hasan Rauf]

Our friend Michael J. Totten continues his stella reporting from Iraq; this time he introduces us to Those Who Face Death.

Iraq is a country with three armies and I’m-not-sure-how-many militias and death squads. The Iraqi Army is nominally the national army, but it’s still being trained, supplied, and augmented by the coalition forces, which is to say the Americans. It’s also not allowed to operate in the north. The third army is the Kurdish Peshmerga, the liberators and protectors of the only part of Iraq – the three northern governates – that may be salvaged from insurgency, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and war. Do not confuse the Peshmerga with the ragtag ethnic and sectarian militias running rampant in Iraq’s center and south. The Kurdish armed forces are a real professional army and are recognized as such in Iraq’s constitution and by the so-called central government in Baghdad.