Why the Kurds Are Paying for Trump’s Gift to Iran.
Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:
” The Americans knew there would be an attack on Kirkuk because their special forces were embedded with the Iraqi army outside the city of Kirkuk and with Kurdish troops, known as Peshmerga, within the city. While US soldiers gave Karim the warning that enabled him to escape, the Trump administration did nothing to prevent an attack in which the Iraqi army and the Iranian-commanded militias used American weapons, including Abrams tanks.”
“The Trump administration, which had been careful to keep the PMF out of ISIS-held Mosul, did nothing to stop these two Iranian-backed terrorists from using American weapons to attack an American ally. But for the action of US soldiers in the area, they would almost certainly have killed another American citizen. After the PMF takeover of Kirkuk, the Pentagon attempted ineffectually to hide its embarrassment by calling the Kurdish-Iraqi fighting a “misunderstanding.” The administration’s complaisant attitude to the Iranian-led action was even more puzzling since it followed Donald Trump’s decision three days earlier to decertify the Iran nuclear deal—justified as a response to Iran’s malign activities in the region, including in Iraq.”
