By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times, 14 May 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 13 — Kurdish and Shiite units of the Iraqi Army faced off in an armed confrontation this week, resulting in the death of at least one Shiite soldier, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
The clash seemed to raise questions about the discipline of the Iraqi Army units that the American military is training here, and about the degree to which the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish soldiers who make up the army have been able to shed their sectarian and ethnic loyalties.
The clash took place on Friday in Balad, a largely Shiite city about 40 miles north of Baghdad. The area around the city is surrounded by Sunni Arab villages that are some of the most active supporters of the guerrilla insurgency.
Details were sketchy, but according to three Iraqi officials, the incident occurred around noon Friday, when a roadside bomb struck a mostly Kurdish army unit that was patrolling near Duluwiya, a Sunni Arab town near Balad. The bomb killed four of the soldiers and wounded two of them.
According to the Iraqi officials, the Kurdish soldiers, who carried their wounded comrades into Balad for medical treatment, were confronted by an army unit that was made up of mostly Shiite soldiers. A confrontation ensued, and the Kurds killed one of the Shiites.
None of the three Iraqi officials who spoke about the incident were willing to have their names published, out of fear for their safety.
According to an Iraqi brigadier reached by telephone in Duluwiya, the Kurdish soldiers, carrying their wounded and unable to speak Arabic, ran into a checkpoint run by the Shiites, who were unable to speak Kurdish. The Kurds then opened fire, the brigadier said.
"They were shooting at random," he said. "There was no way to communicate. They don't understand each other."
The other two officials said the Kurds shot the Shiite soldier when he tried to rush the hospital in Balad where the wounded Kurdish soldiers were being treated. The Shiite soldier thought his own comrades were inside, one of the officials said.
The Iraqi officials' accounts agreed on one point: the Shiite soldiers did not return fire, and the confrontation waned.
The Iraqi brigadier said that tension between Kurds and Arabs, who predominate in the area, helped spur the incident. "There is a big sensitivity to Kurds in this place," the brigadier said. "The people in Balad are very Shia. They don't like to have Kurds in this place."
"People are saying: what are the Kurds doing here?" he said.
While the overwhelmingly majority of Iraq's Kurds live in the northeastern corner of the country, they are represented in the new Iraqi Army in numbers far exceeding their proportion in the population.
The Kurdish militia, known as the pesh merga, is a battle-tested and pro-American force whose units are deployed with great frequency in the Sunni areas of Iraq to help fight the insurgency there.
Tensions between Kurds and Shiites are generally rare; both are largely allied with the Americans in Iraq against the Sunnis, a minority that ruled Iraq for hundreds of years before the American invasion in 2003.
The incident in Balad raises questions about the American military's efforts to train tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police. The heart of that effort involves bringing together the soldiers from the country's main ethnic and sectarian groups — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — into a single fighting force. An integrated Iraqi army is also seen as a vehicle to unite the country.
Mona Mahmood and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.
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Citation: Dexter Filkins. "Kurdish and Shiite Units of Iraqi Army Clash," The New York Times, 14 May 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html
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