ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A senior member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan for the first time revealed the size of the PUK’s military force, stressing that the Peshmarga Ministry must go to his party in the next Kurdish cabinet and warning that the soldiers would not take orders from anyone else.
“How can they not give the Ministry of Peshmarga to the PUK? Do they know that the PUK has 120 tanks and a command staff,” said the politburo member, speaking to Rudaw on condition of anonymity.
“Do you know that the PUK employs 20,000 Peshmargas, tank battalion, artillery battalion and engineering battalion? Some officials within the PUK have two private brigades,” the official revealed for the first time.
More than five months after legislative elections in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region in September, the three main parties that won the largest votes still are quibbling over who gets which ministry and senior posts.
The sticking point has been that the PUK, a strategic partner in the outgoing government with the dominant Kurdistan Democratic Party, did not do as well as it expected at the polls. The KDP came first, the PUK-breakaway Change Movement (Gorran) came second and the PUK itself came third.
Officials involved in the negotiations blame the PUK’s internal disputes, and its insistence on certain positions and posts despite its loss of power, for the delay in formation of a new government.
Now, PUK officials appear to be reminding their political rivals that they have their own private army, which does not take its orders from the KRG.
“How can the KDP keep the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Intelligence Agency and the Ministry of Peshmarga?” the anonymous PUK official had told the KDP in a message. “Nothing will be left for the PUK, then,” the message reportedly said.
The source told Rudaw that the PUK’s Jaffar Sheikh Mustafa, who is minister of Peshmarga in the outgoing cabinet, is the only man who can control the PUK forces. “I do not believe that anyone outside the PUK can fulfill the role of Sheikh Jaffar,” said the source.
Mustafa himself refused comment, expressing his anger at a report on corruption inside the Peshmarga Ministry that was published in another Rudaw publication.
Meanwhile Anwar Haji Osman, undersecretary of the Peshmarga Ministry and a KDP member, criticized the PUK stance over the issue.
“The Ministry of Peshmarga is the ministry of blood. We must not think about the KDP and the PUK, and should organize an army to serve all the people of Kurdistan,” he said.
“This is a catastrophe,” said Osman, commenting on the PUK’s warning that its forces would not take orders from the KRG.
A military expert in Kurdistan told Rudaw that the tanks under PUK control were those seized from former dictator Saddam Hussein.
“All the tanks are Russian. When the Saddam regime collapsed, the PUK seized the fifth brigade in Kirkuk and moved the tanks to Sulaimani. Some of these tanks are still in Qalachulan, Chwar Qurni, Hamreen and the outskirts of Kirkuk,” he said.
“They are all Russian made T-55 tanks with a gun range of 17 kilometers.”
