Senators preparing emergency aid for Kurds

[Anthea]

The Washington Post

The United States’ most reliable allies on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State are desperate for cash, and a pair of Republican senators are trying to find a way to quickly get it to them.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations’ subcommittee on Foreign Operations, and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) are exploring an emergency supplemental appropriations bill to get money to the Kurds, who haven’t been able to pay their fighters in months, and have been making a desperate plea to the United States for direct economic assistance.

“I’m trying to find a way to get money to the Kurds,” Graham said Thursday.

But others are worried that any effort to help the Kurds directly could create a much more problematic backlash from Baghdad — despite the Kurdish Peshmerga forces’ vital role in taking back territory from ISIS.

“In all of these things, one has to make a decision: are you doing something that’s helping the cause, or are you doing something that’s increasing the likelihood of Iraq breaking apart,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

Corker said Graham and McCain had not yet approached him about an aid package, but noted that Kurdish representatives he met with in Washington last month were “lobbying heavily” for financial assistance.

“It’s the same issue I had with arming the Kurds some time ago,” Corker added. “When you begin doing that, you have to take into account you could be encouraging the breaking apart of the country.”

Presently, any assistance the United States sends to the Kurds goes through Baghdad. Various measures to arm the Kurds directly have been pending in Congress, but the administration’s policy has been to send all weapons through Baghdad, where they are stored in warehouses and then transferred to the Kurdish region in the north of Iraq.

Baghdad is also responsible for giving the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 17 percent of the national budget, which depends in large part on oil revenues.

But the Kurds say those payments haven’t been coming for several months. And even though the KRG recently started exporting oil directly to global markets — over the protestations of the Iraqi government that such moves were illegal — the price of oil has tanked so dramatically that they cannot make up the shortfall.

In an interview with the Associated Press last month, Kurdish foreign minister Falah Mustafa Bakir said it would cost about $2 billion a year to continue to pay salaries to the Kurdish fighters. He was asking the Pentagon for help.

The low price of oil is one of the reasons Graham is pursuing an economic aid package, he said. But while he didn’t specify just how much money he wants to send to the Kurds, Graham doubted that it would be as much as $2 billion.

Graham and McCain are two of the more hawkish members of Congress when it comes to the fight against the Islamic State, calling for everything from thousands of U.S. ground troops to more resources for the Kurdish fighters. Both have called for arming the Kurds directly — an effort that has failed to pass Congress, as many members are concerned about the implications of circumventing Baghdad.

But McCain suggested that sending money to the Kurds wouldn’t be a tough sell.

“Emergency appropriations — you can pass an appropriations bill,” McCain added. “After the Israelis used up Iron Dome? Lindsey Graham and I went to the floor, $150 million, unanimous consent.”

The Kurds, despite their close relationship with the United States in the fight against ISIS, do not have as historically strong a relationship with Congress as Israel. Regardless, Graham and McCain want to get a measure together to help them quickly.

“They want direct aid. They want money right now, they need money to pay their military,” McCain said, suggesting it would not be difficult to get such a measure through Congress.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... for-kurds/

[Anthea]

Senators preparing emergency aid for Kurds

I do not know about anyone else but idea of emergency is not to sit back and wait a few years

Especially the previous 2 years during which time Kurdistan has taken in more than 2 million refugees and been at the forefront of the fight against the Islamic State