The Iraqi people, in the forefront Iraqi Kurds, are ready to provide an example that will inevitably remind the Americans of the Vietnam complex, the government newspaper al-Jumhou-riya declared in a front-page editorial.
Beware of the wrath of Iraqi Kurds...They should not believe that what happened can be controlled by force, it said.
Iraqi troops backed by armour and artillery intervened on Saturday on the side of Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), to recapture the Kurdish stronghold of Arbil from Jalal Talabanis Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Iraq said earlier yesterday it would withdraw its troops. Washington expressed scepticism about the pledge.
But a senior KDP official in the northern Iraqi town of Zakho said on Sunday that Baghdad had already pulled more than half its forces out of Arbil.
About 40,000 Iraqi soldiers had entered. A large portion of that more than half of them have withdrawn, Husa-meddin Mohammed said.
Earlier, a UN source in Baghdad said the Kurdish stronghold of Sulaimaniya, the last remaining major Iraqi city held by Talabani, was the target of artillery fire yesterday morning.
According to our reports there has been shelling in Sulaimaniya but we cannot determine where it came from, the source said.
Iraqs official news agency INA said people arriving in Kirkuk from Sulaimaniya said the area was not shelled during operations by Iraqi forces around Arbil.
The Iraqi thrust into Arbil was the first in the area since Washington and its Western allies set up an air exclusion zone in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War to protect Iraqi Kurds against attacks by Baghdad.
It prompted the US, Iraqi President Saddam Husseins Gulf War foe, to put its forces in West Asia on high alert and posed a difficult challenge to American President Bill Clinton in the middle of the American election campaign.
