U.S Stregthens Grip on Northern Iraq in Bid to Calm Turkey

Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main parties in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq said, ”Yesterday we withdrew half our peshmerga forces and today we are moving the remaining forces.”

But he added that some would stay behind at the invitation of the U.S. military to help impose order in a city where looting and vandalism broke out on Thursday and Friday.

Kurdish “peshmerga” fighters swept into Kirkuk on Thursday as government forces collapsed, causing alarm in neighboring Turkey which suspects Iraqi Kurds want to claim the city as the capital of an independent state. Turkey fears this could fan separatism among its own Kurds.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops moved into Mosul on Saturday in the first significant U.S. deployment in Iraq’s biggest northern city since troops loyal to Saddam Hussein surrendered without a fight a day earlier.

A Reuters team driving around the city on Saturday, one day after its fall, saw U.S. troops with heavy weapons at various road junctions.

But Iraq’s third largest city remained anarchic, dangerous and rife with gunfire despite the U.S. presence, with reports of ethnic fighting between Arabs and Kurds.

Even away from the city’s central Arab quarter, the scene of violent looting and torching of buildings on Friday, Mosul looked thoroughly ransacked Saturday. Waste paper, looted from thousands of offices, blew around the streets, filling the gutters. Roads and pavements were blocked by debris and broken furniture.

The U.S. bid to assert control over Kirkuk and Mosul is part of Washington’s overall plan to keep Iraq whole and to prevent the country’s Kurds, who have controlled the autonomous north since the 1991 Gulf War, from breaking away.

Turkey has said in the past it is willing to risk the fury of the United States by sending a large military force into northern Iraq to prevent any Kurdish independence bid.

Turkey accepted Friday U.S. promises to block any bid by Iraqi Kurds to control northern oilfields, but signaled it was still ready to send its own troops if it saw a Kurdish move toward independence.

“Yesterday we told [U.S. Secretary of State Colin] Powell that if their forces are not enough, we can [take control] together and if neither of those work, we could do it on our own,” Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Friday.