By Michael Birmingham
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad, Iraq

If you look at Iraqi patrol officers all over Baghdad you see an individual Iraqi soldier standing on his own without any body armor without anyone protecting him. Then you see a load of American soldiers with body armor in humvees, or riding on the back with their fingers on the triggers of heavy submachine guns. The Iraqi soldiers protect all the roads leading up to the location of the American soldiers

The US stations the Iraqis in the Facilities Protection Service outside ministries and benzene stations. They’re the ones assigned to protect these and other public buildings, such as the courts and police stations They’re very vulnerable.

The American soldiers drive through packed streets with a very aggressive Force Protection If something happens to them, the onus is on the fellow on the back of the humvee to open fire on a civilian crowd. If he doesn’t do this he’s putting his colleagues at risk. The American soldiers don’t care about the Iraqi soldiers’ lives. They’re set up as sitting ducks outside outposts for the American forces. These Iraqi troops are looking at survival on very poor wages. Unequal distribution of risk and payments isn’t going to help develop or inspire loyalty to the American troops amongst the newly graduated Iraqi Army battalion.

They’ve also made a decision to bring in the armed militia of the CRII, (Supreme Council of the Revolutionary Islam) the Badr brigade and two Kurdish militia groups to be set up as a paramilitary force. For example, Jalal Talabani, who has one of the three militias, has suggested that they allow his Peshmurga and the Badr troops into the Tikrit- Fallujah areas because he’ll be able to tell a Baathist by the way he walks. The US has agreed to set these groups up as official paramilitary militias. It would be completely the antithesis of any kind of human rights or law-based approach dealing with this problem–the opposite of any kind of conflict resolution effort for the protection of civilians.

There’s a lot of concern that some of these militias will be going around and “taking out” people, that is, doing assassinations of their enemies.

Some “Force Protection” for the paramilitaries does exist because they have their own structures and political leaders. They’d have an opportunity to have someone speak out in their behalf. The idea for them is that they’ll be safer because they’ll be small paramilitary brigades–they’re not just cannon fodder.

I don’t know if it will be safe for them as individuals and I don’t know if there’s any commitment from the Americans to protect them. The police drive around at night and look like they’re afraid the Americans will shoot them.

This new development is happening in a volatile context. There’s a lot of work to be done to try and defuse the conflict between the varying groups. But it seems clear that bringing Peshmurga into the Sunni areas where people have terrorized and tortured the Kurds for decades is not wise.