Matthew Cancian
Survey on the Peshmerga forces
“So what I’m going to focus on is my doctoral research that I did. So in the summer of 2017, I was able to go and do the survey throughout the range of Kurdistan, in Bashur.”
“So you can see that we had the survey sites ranging from sin jar in the West, down to Halawa in the East. I’ll just touch on one thing that is one of the results that we got in the survey. So we had these enumerators for students at the various universities, like Salahadin, AKU, AUIS. So each one of these interviewee did individual interviews because one person out of the 2300 population that we had in the survey. And so the first, the one thing I want to address is coalition training.”
“About a third of the Peshmerga had no formal training, 32.9%. They had just shown up and they had begun fighting for what they believed in. 31% had training from other Peshmerga at these formal sites in Rania, Zakho, there are sort of large scale sites where they can get trained from other Peshmerga and then 36% had actually received this individual training from the coalition. So then the question is, well, did this coalition training make a difference? Was it a good thing, should it continue? And so we continue through, we can ask them on a scale of zero to 10, how confident are you in your unit’s readiness for combat is sort of one metric, one of the more easily explainable ones. There are several other sorts of complicated survey experiments that we did, but without getting a little bit into the MIT wonky side, we can’t explain very well.
So we sort these on their confidence from zero to 10, and then we can compare them. And that the Peshmerga who received their coalition training works significantly more confident than either the untrained or the Peshmerga who had received only internal training from other Peshmerga. And so it’s important to note that these are the Peshmergas who have received the coalition training, they go out and fight, and then they come and then we reach them and we ask them their questions. And they say, yes, this coalition training is working. It’s very much helping.”
“That one interesting thing is that the Peshmerga are overwhelmingly citing their nationalist ideology, their love of Kurdistan as why they are continuing to go forward in combat, whereas on the right hand side, this is showing American soldiers in world war II, who are just saying, I want to keep fighting because I want to end the war. I just want to go home, but the Kurdish soldiers, when you ask them why they’re fighting overwhelmingly, they’re saying I’m fighting for Kurdistan. They’re very, very motivated by their love of their home country there. “
“That’s one question about the training and they’re sort of low level. The tactical effectiveness and coalition training was very effective because the Peshmerga is very, very motivated. Then another question is, well, what about this political integration? Where for years we’ve been trying to integrate the political units of the Peshmerga. There’s the Yakanai Hafta versus Hashta [70th Unit and 80th Unit]. These are the unit seventies, unit eighties, the Zeravani who are paramilitary KDP forces. We’ve been trying to put them together into these integrated brigades. And you ask the Peshmerga and they overwhelmingly favor integration. There’s no sort of discrimination against other Peshmmerga where they’re just as willing to work with Peshmerga from other political units. They don’t believe that the other units are any worse than they are. And so all these political divisions in the KRG don’t translate into this animosity between the individual Peshmerga. “
“[The Peshmerga unification] are really actually political problems of disagreements about what should be done and who should do it. And that the integration of the units is sort of a political question, which requires political willpower from civilian leaders. And that’s just a matter of time before you have both sides who sort of come to the understanding that this is a political problem that we need to do it. I think that another problem that we generally have and understanding Kurdistan, I say we as myself and other Americans, is that a sort of narrative takes hold about these people are reformers and these people are not. And so these other people are holding up reforms and that’s not necessarily a very helpful way. It’s a very easy narrative. It’s not necessarily true though. “
What would be the best ways for the United States to support the Peshmerga without US troops on the ground?
“First is in terms of maintaining the effectiveness of the Peshmerga, they really lack a lot of heavy equipment, which might be okay in some instances, I think lacking helicopters, lacking tanks, those are very logistically intensive pieces of equipment. They’re very difficult to maintain, but that more sort of mid grade weaponry, like you heard about the Milan missile launchers during the fight against Daesh that were extremely important. They’re very easy to use and that the Peshmerga were huge force multipliers. That is one way that you could continue to keep the Peshmergas effectiveness, military effectiveness high, but then the question is about political unification. And just like Dr. Karim said, this is a political question. It’s not something where if we keep sending army staff officers over there to help them make new organizations within the ministry of Peshmerga that they’re eventually going to be unified. This is a political decision and that the US just has to foster inter-party talks in order to get this agreement between them.”
Why there is not US coordination between the Peshmerga and the SDF
In terms of coordination between the SDF and the Peshmerga, you know, the US military is extremely bureaucratized. And, Sykes-Picot has continues to exert its influence on American bureaucracy. And once you cross over that border, you’re in a whole different command structure. I think that’s part of the reason why there’s problems with the US in coordinating that. But even within Kurdistan, most of the Americans even in Bashurrather than Rojava, the Americans who work in Iraq are always trying generally trying to work towards a unified Iraq, rather than trying to acknowledge the realities of the Kurdistan regions’ independence.Part of the problem, you saw this in October 16th [2017] where the US is saying, Oh, this is just some sort of shifting of troops between different locations, without really having some understanding that no, this is the Shittee militias are coming in and raising their flag in the governor’s office.”