Word: peshmerga
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...This time, though, the unpleasantness is certainly not all of the locals' making. Ever since the collapse of Kirkuk a week ago, tension has been seeping slowly down the road to Tikrit, 100 or so kilometers away. Bands of self-styled peshmerga, Kurdish guerillas, have been venturing down the road, looking - they say - for holdouts from the Saddam regime. But they are looters, not peshmerga - a nasty bunch reminiscent of the mobs that followed medieval armies, killing the wounded left on the battlefield and stripping them of their valuables. The Kurdish marauders tell stories of villages full of armed members...
...commander of the Kurdish peshmerga forces, was more frank. "In other cities there was fighting and Saddam's men were either killed or ran away," said Omed Mohammed. The Americans and Kurds entered the city without a fight last Friday, but now are finding that their victory was hollow. "Here there was no war so the fedayeen [Saddam, Uday's paramilitary fighting force] and other members of the security are still here. They just don't go to their offices, but hide in their homes." The famously brave peshmerga won't go to many Arab neighborhoods. "We're afraid," Mohammed...
...responsibility for the city to the Kurdish forces that stormed the city Thursday morning, chasing out the meager Iraqi forces without a fight. But within hours Kurds from the far northern cities of Erbil and Suleymaniya were streaming into the city with empty pickup trucks. In some places the Peshmerga Kurdish forces were vainly trying to stop the looting, while they actively participated in others. Arab and Turkish residents claimed they were being targeted. One Turk who whose car was stolen at gunpoint begged the Americans to help him get it back. "We don't trust the Kurds," he said...
...Under pressure from Turkey, the main Kurdish parties agreed to withdraw their Peshmerga, but in their place came policemen from Erbil and Suleymaniya - again Kurds...
...dream: to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime and get democracy. We don't want civil war," said one shopowner, Zuhair Muhammed. But just a few hours later, the streets were controlled by Kurds. Crowds of teenage boys rode in the back of pickups shooting their Kalashnikovs in the air. Peshmerga commandeered Iraqi tanks for joyrides. Someone pasted a photocopied image of the face of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani over the face on one mural of Saddam Hussein...