Really Really Horrendously Bad News

Hate to be the pessimist (no I don't), but this is bad bad news:

Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.

Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops who are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.

The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga -- the Kurdish militia -- and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

''It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion,'' said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours.''

We're seriously screwed if this happens. Turkey will leap with both feet into this brawl to resist an autonomous Kurdish state on their borders. Iran, who has already signed tentative agreements to aid Iraqi security, would likely come in on the side of the Shiites. The Sunnis would feel the pinch from both sides, but still have allies in the region. This could spark a much wider war, and we simply do not have the boots on the ground to stop it. As Kurdistan has been relatively calm during the war, our forces are not heaviuly deployed in the area.

It appears all sides of this conflict are expecting, even hoping for chaos, which will then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rise of sectarian militias, Trojan horses embedded within the Iraqi security units upon which the US has placed their entire victory strategy, is deeply disturbing. If there is no loyalty to Iraq above ethnic identity, there's absolutely no hope for anything but civil war or a tripartite partition.

American military officials have said they're trying to get a broader mix of sects in the Iraqi units.

''The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab soldiers from the south,'' Naji said. ``After two weeks of service, we sent them away. We did not accept them. We will not let them carry through with their plans to bring more Arab soldiers here.''

This article is frightening.