Sunday, August 26, 2007

UPDATE ON TURKISH-FUNDED COUNTER-GUERRILLAS IN IRAQ

In an update on some information published on Özgür Gündem a few weeks ago (for English check here).

Apparently, the Iraqi insurgent group, 1920 Revolution Brigade, has been "rebranded" by the US military in a new marketing campaign to show how well The Surge® is doing:


The updated vocabulary for referring to the 1920 Revolution Brigade, described by a U.S. commander on Saturday, is a sign of the abrupt change in tactics that has seen U.S. forces cooperate with former Sunni Arab enemies.

The 1920 Revolution Brigade was one of the main anti-American Sunni Arab insurgent groups in Iraq in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and has claimed responsibility for killing scores of U.S. troops in ambushes and bomb attacks.

But for the past several months its members have cooperated with U.S. forces to help drive the strict al Qaeda Islamists out of Sunni Arab areas, part of a new U.S. tactic of cooperating with former Sunni Arab foes against al Qaeda.

Colonel David Sutherland, the U.S. commander in Diyala Province, said his men prefer not to call the group by its name.

"The 1920s as they're called, we call them 'the Baquba Guardians', we call them the 'concerned local nationals'," he said. Baquba is the provincial capital.

"These are patriots who have come forward and have joined the security process. They are working with my soldiers and they are working with the Iraqi security forces," he said.


And they're paid by Turkish intelligence.

The 1920 Revolution Brigade was named by Özgür Gündem as among those Sunni insurgency groups that Turkey was paying and supplying technical and logistical support in order to delay the Kerkuk Referendum.

Now, obviously, it appears that the 1920s have been whitewashed of their "terrorist" past by the US military. It makes me wonder how much the US is involved with black operations in order to put off the Kerkuk Referendum.

Oh, yeah, bear in mind that while groups like the 1920 Revolution Brigade have "kill[ed] scores of U.S. troops in ambushes and bomb attacks," no organization belonging to KCK (i.e. "PKK") has ever killed a single American.

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