Iraqi Armed Forces - Structure

Structure

Iraqi security forces are composed of forces serving under the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and the Ministry of Defense (MOD), as well as the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Bureau, reporting directly to the Prime Minister of Iraq, which oversees the Iraqi Special Operations Forces. MOD forces include the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Air Force and the Iraqi Navy. The MOD also runs a Joint Staff College, training army, navy, and air force officers, with support from the NATO Training Mission - Iraq. The college was established at Ar Rustamiyah on September 27, 2005. The center runs Junior Staff and Senior Staff Officer Courses designed for first lieutenants to majors.

The Peshmerga, since September 2009 the 'Armed Forces of the Kurdistan Region,' are a separate armed force loyal to the Kurdistan Regional Government. The force is quite sizable. USF-I public affairs officers indicated that the KDP and PUK both have around 100,000 peshmerga (totalling 200,000) as of January 2010. The two divisions are included in this figure; the regional government and the central government disagree as to whether they are under Baghdad's authority and to what extent.

Military intelligence has been rebuilt since the army was dissolved in 2003. However it has suffered from political interference. In mid 2009 Prime Minister al-Maliki reportedly dismissed Major General Jamal Suleiman, the director of military intelligence, and took on the job himself. The Prime minister had reportedly dismissed the director of Iraqi national intelligence at the same time.

Read more about this topic:  Iraqi Armed Forces

Famous quotes containing the word structure:

    I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
    Václav Havel (b. 1936)

    The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)