Sulaimaniya, 29 July 2007 (Voices of Iraq)

The Iraqi Kurdistan region’s government is ready to send 12,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to protect power towers, the spokesman for the peshmerga said on Sunday.

“We’re waiting for the approval of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,” Jabbar Yawir, the undersecretary of the ministry of Peshmerga affairs, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

He said “we are in agreement with the central government in Baghdad to send 6,000 troops to protect power facilities on the Taza-Baiji highway.”

He pointed out that the central defense ministry in Baghdad has asked the Iraqi Kurdistan government in a meeting in Arbil, the region’s capital, earlier in July for dispatching 6,000 Peshmerga soldiers to protect the oil pipeline in the district of al-Shurqat, 80 km south of Mosul, which leads to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

The Kurdish 2nd Brigade Commander, Anwar Hama Amin, had said on Saturday that Kurdish Peshmerga forces will be deployed in several areas of Kirkuk to protect power towers and oil installations.

“Bringing the Peshmarga to the province is part of an agreement and a protocol signed between the General Commander of the armed forces, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the President of Iraqi Kurdistan region, Masoud Barazani,” said Amin in a press conference held on Saturday at the military training base of K1 in Kirkuk.

The Peshmarga is the Kurdish name for a militia that fought the former Iraqi regime, and, after the regime of Saddam Hussein withdrew the Iraqi army from the three Kurdish provinces in 1992, turned into paramilitary forces to protect the region. Two ministries were established to deal with the Peshmerga affairs in 2006 in the region’s government.

This is not the first time Peshmarga forces are sent to areas outside the region of Kurdistan. Three battalions were sent last March to Baghdad to help consolidating security in the capital.

The oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which contains a mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Chaldean-Assyrians and Christians, is 250 km northeast Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Amin said that twenty-four suspects were arrested and seven car bombs were seized in a security operation that lasted for two days on the outskirts of Kirkuk.

News courtesy of Iraq Updates Limited

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