Author: RawandKurdistani » Mon Oct 08, 2012 1:23 pm
SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region –Arsalan Bayiz, the speaker of Kurdish Parliament, announced last month that compulsory military service was being reviewed by MPs as part of a proposed bill.
Muhammad Sharazuri, the chairman of the Peshmerga committee in parliament and an MP for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said it would be good to define a period for the youth to serve in the military, though it should not be for more than one year.
"This is one of the needs of the state,” he said. “The Ministry of Peshmerga should demand it and parliament should study it."
"This will refute the accusations that the Peshmerga forces are a partisan armed force when people from all groups and classes will participate," he added.
After the end of Baathist rule in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, the name of the military was changed to Peshmerga and service became voluntary.
Rawand Muhammad said he would never wish for a return to compulsory military service. "I would not do it even if it was for a single year,” he said, recalling bitter memories of his father’s compulsory service. “It will never work in Kurdistan."
According to Fazil Basharati, an MP from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and member of the Peshmerga committee, the only way to create a national army and institutionalize the Peshmerga is by making military service compulsory.
"It is true that it might be difficult at the moment, but it must be implemented eventually," he said.
Nariman Abdullah, a Change Movement (Gorran) MP in the security and interior committee, believes that compulsory military service is the practice of totalitarian regimes.
The parliamentary bloc leader of the Kurdistan Islamic League (Komal), Aram Qadir, agrees, saying it would be impossible to implement compulsory service in Kurdistan while talking about freedom and democracy.
Omar Abdul-Aziz, bloc leader of the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), said, "It can't be done at this stage because the Ministry of Peshmerga has not been united yet and the PUK and KDP have a complete monopoly over this ministry."
"No one responds to the calls of recruitment from Baghdad,” said General Qaraman Kamal, the military training directory for the Ministry of Peshmerga. “The Kurdish youth would not apply even if military academies were built right in front of their homes."
Kamal said that the ministry calls on graduates of high schools and vocational institutions every year to apply to the military academies in Baghdad because they can take part due to the 17 percent participation right of the Kurdistan Region.
Last year, there were only 20 applicants to the two military colleges, Zakho and Qala Cholan.
“The percentage of the Kurdish presence in the Iraqi Army is decreasing day after day. Our officers and senior military officials are leaving the Iraqi Army and returning to the Kurdistan Region," said Kamal.
Upon his return from Germany, Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq and leader of the PUK, discussed the issue of the decreasing number of Kurds in the Iraqi Army and asked his party members to encourage Kurdish youth to sign up.
According to Arif Tayfur, the second deputy speaker of Iraqi Parliament, the problem lies with the youth and not Iraqi military officials. "We make all these calls and only 10 to 20 of them apply,” he said. “We cannot increase the number of Kurds in the Iraqi Army this way."
Officials in Kurdistan’s Ministry of Peshmerga have launched an awareness campaign to encourage youth to apply to air force colleges. However, logistics brigadier-general for the Iraqi air force, Azad Ibrahim Shali, said no youth have answered the call to join.
"We have 30 Kurdish helicopter pilots,” he said. “We also have one flight instructor. But this number is very small."
He added, "The military aviation college has been opened and will accept 50 airfare cadets -- 27 Shia Arabs, 15 Sunni Arabs, seven Kurds and one Turkmen. But I personally asked the Kurdish MPs to increase the allowed number of Kurdish cadets from seven to nine."
In 1927, a group of Iraqi students was sent to military aviation college in Britain. They returned to Iraq on April 22, 1931, which was proclaimed the day the Iraqi Air Force was founded.
Recruiting Kurdish pilots was banned from 1971 to 2003. In June 2004, the new Iraqi Air Force was formed, and Kurds started participating in training courses in 2007. Only eight Kurdish pilots graduated from the initial courses. In the latest course, 27 Kurdish cadets were enrolled.
Kurdistan, the great land of the Medes.
(Even tough it will take quite some time before they arrive if we order SU-35. So i would go with SU-27/30 if we need fast(er) delivery)
