Peshmerga model for Iraq: Carter

IRBIL: Pentagon chief Ashton Carter said during a visit to Kurdistan Friday that the autonomous region’s peshmerga force was a model for the rest of Iraq in its fight against extremists.

The US defense secretary, on the second day of his first visit to Iraq since taking office earlier this year, praised the efforts of what is the region’s de facto army.
“We are trying to build a force throughout the territory of Iraq, and someday in Syria, that can do” what the peshmerga have achieved, Carter said. He was speaking in the Kurdish capital Irbil in front of members of the US-led coalition deployed in Kurdistan to help push back Daesh.
Moments earlier, he met Kurdish President Massud Barzani.
Carter “commended President Barzani on the battlefield successes they’ve achieved on the ground in coordination with US and coalition air power,” a Pentagon statement said.
Several high-ranking Kurdish military officials attended the talks with Carter, on his first trip to Iraq since taking office earlier this year.
The threat posed to Irbil by a Daesh advance early last August was one of the reasons cited days later by US President Barack Obama for announcing US air strikes.
An international coalition has since developed and carried out thousands of airstrikes, many in support of peshmerga forces fighting Daesh.
Carter had expressed his frustration in May after Iraqi government forces, who had held on for almost 18 months in Ramadi, the capital of the western province of Anbar, completely buckled and lost the city.
Carter was in Baghdad Thursday and said the United States was ready to do more to help Baghdad’s forces reconquer the ground they lost last year but added that the army needed to shape up.
“We are willing to do more... when and if (the Iraqis) develop capable, motivated forces of their own that can take and retain territory,” he said as he met some of the 3,500 US military trainers and advisers in Iraq.
Barzani, whose forces have de facto seized several oil-rich, contested areas on the back of last year’s Daesh offensive, has threatened to organize a referendum on independence.
Carter stressed during his meeting with the veteran Kurdish leader Friday that Washington’s assistance to Kurdistan as part of the war against Daesh would not bypass Baghdad.
“The secretary also noted that the United States would continue working by, with, and through the government of Iraq to support Kurdish forces in the fight against Daesh,” the Pentagon statement said.