N. Barzani calls for a Federal Democratic Parliamentary State in Iraq. 

U.S. Woos Kurds as Anti-Saddam Allies 
USA Today 
Barbara Slavin 

June 18, 2002 

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is seeking to create a broad coalition against Saddam Hussein by courting Kurds, the only opposition group to control territory and major military forces in Iraq. 

Two Kurdish groups that have long feuded agreed this month to work together to use a $3.1 million U.S. grant to improve health care in the mountainous region of northern Iraq, home to 4 million Kurds. State Department officials said the agreement is an important step toward building an effective opposition to Saddam. 

The grant is the latest U.S. overture to the Kurds, who have been leery of President Bush's push to overthrow the Iraqi leader. CIA Director George Tenet met with leaders of the two Kurdish factions at CIA headquarters this spring, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker has visited the Kurdish region twice in the past six months. 

The courtship of the Kurds, whose support is considered crucial to Bush's hopes of toppling Saddam, represents a change in U.S. strategy of funneling all anti-Saddam aid through the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a controversial, London-based group with strong support in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. 

''We're looking to support as wide as possible an array of opposition groups,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday. 

The State Department has periodically cut off funding for the INC because of its failure to fully account for how it spends U.S. aid. The State Department has offered the group $8 million through the rest of this year, but a Senate subcommittee is holding up the money. 

Senate staffers say they don't see much support within Iraq for INC leader Ahmed Chalabi, a banker educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has spent most of the past 20 years in the West. 

''There is a growing feeling that we should move . . . toward supporting a broader range of Iraqi opposition groups,'' said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. 

That view was embraced reluctantly in late May by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an INC backer. Helms let the $3.1 million grant for the Kurds go through after holding it up since October.
But Danielle Pletka, a former Helms aide and now vice president of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said the State Department strategy of bypassing the INC would fracture anti-Saddam forces. 

Kurdish leaders say they are no longer willing to work exclusively within the INC, which was formed a year after the 1991 Gulf War but has never mounted a successful challenge to Saddam's rule. Despite U.S. efforts to unite the Kurds, Iraq experts doubt the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP) or Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) will play a key military role in Iraq similar to the Northern Alliance offensive to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

Even so, U.S. officials consider united Kurdish support indispensable. The two groups control the northern third of Iraq and command 70,000 troops. The Kurds are protected by a no-fly zone enforced by U.S. and British aircraft. 

A State Department document describing the new grant lists ''improving coordination between the PUK and KDP'' as its first goal. 

The world's 25 million Kurds -- the largest ethnic group without its own country -- are scattered through Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. 

The Bush administration in February gave the CIA the go-ahead for a new covert effort to overthrow Saddam. But the Kurds have had an unhappy history of collaboration with the United States: 

* Mustafa Barzani, a leader of a Kurdish independence movement, was supported and then dropped by the CIA in the 1970s. 

* After the Gulf War, the first President Bush urged Kurds to rise up against Saddam, but the U.S. military failed to protect them from Iraqi forces, which killed several thousand Kurds. 

* Fighting between the Kurdish groups opened the way for an Iraqi incursion in 1996 that killed hundreds more Kurds and wrecked another CIA effort to overthrow Saddam. 

Kurds also do not want to jeopardize the autonomy and relative prosperity they have gained because of the protection of the no-fly zone. ''We are interested in regime change but will not give up what we have achieved over the last 10 years,'' says Hoshyar Zebari, director of international relations for the KDP.

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