Peshmerga Train Syrian Kurd Fighters in Northern Iraq

The Kurdish regional government’s peshmerga forces in northern Iraq are providing military training to a Syrian Kurd group linked with the Kurdish National Coalition in Syria, a Kurdish official confirmed Friday.

“We are providing war training to nearly 3,000 Syrian Kurds on our soil,” Jabbar Yawar, the secretary-general of the peshmerga, told the Turkish Anadolu Agency.

World Bulletin website quoted Yawar as saying that peshmerga troops could fight militants of the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL) terrorist group in Syria, if the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or the PYD and other Kurdish parties united.

The Syrian Kurd group under training is said to be close to the Kurdish regional government’s chief, Massoud Barzani. The group mainly operates in Rojava, a Kurdish-majority area in northeast Syria.

Yawar also asked for more weapons from the West, which he said would be used against ISIL, which now controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.

The official said his forces would continue to cooperate with the international coalition until they fully recaptured Iraq’s second city Mosul and other regions from the ISIL militants.

Last Wednesday, Barzani called on the Kurdish National Coalition in Syria and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party to unify and take on ISIL militants in the Syrian town of Kobani that has been the scene of fierce fighting since last mid-September.