The Office of the Secretary of Defense held another in its series of blogger roundtables this morning with featured guests Major General Kurt Cichowski, deputy chief of staff for strategy, plans, and assessment Multinational Force Iraq and Brigadier General Neil Baverstock, Cichowski's deputy. Both generals are serving in the Kurdistan region and Cichowski opened with a statement about yesterday's transfer of security responsibility for the three northern provinces to the Kurdish regional government. The Turkish Daily News quotes one peshmerga colonel who attended the ceremony:

"It's a sort of independence," Colonel Shadman Ali of the peshmerga, the Kurdish security force, told AFP. "We are very glad and proud and have been waiting for this day for so long. It gives us a great source of hope."

The Turks fear an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, and the sense that this transfer might have been another step in that direction is reason to worry that an already tense situation on Iraq's northern border may deteriorate further. Predictably, most of the questions put to the two generals concerned relations with the Turks and their perception of the handover. The first question came from RedState's Streif. He asked if the security forces in Kurdistan are comprised mainly of the Kurdish peshmerga or if they are drawn from throughout Iraq. Cichowski explained that there are parts of at least three Iraqi Army divisions operating in the north--the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th divisions. The even number divisions, the 2nd and 4th, were built from national guard forces, so those divisions are largely Kurdish. The 3rd is more of a mix. Also, Cichowski says that the Iraqi constitution allows for a "regional guard," and, in the north, this guard is made up of the "leftovers of what we call the CPA 91 militia, which in this particular case is the peshmerga, or what is left of the peshmerga. But they are now the regional guards, both the PDK and KUP have formed together into one, and they are now the Kurdish Regional Guards." Asked which division controls the area around Kirkuk, Cichowski responded "Kirkuk is not in the Kurdish region." The Danger Room's David Axe was up next, and he's already posted his thoughts on the call under the title "Lies My Leaders Told Me," so you can imagine he wasn't very pleased with the answers he got. Axe asked if it wasn't a "dicey" time for a handoff given the tense situation on the northern border, and, to be fair, Axe's concerns were not taken very seriously by the general, who seemed to think that there wasn't much to worry about vis-à-vis the Turks:

"I was sitting next to the Prime Minister of the Kurdish region [Nechervan] Barzani when a representative of the media from Turkey came up. They were obviously friends, each one of them asked the other about their fathers and exchanged pleasantries...The representative of the media told the prime minister he was going to go back to Turkey today to meet with the Turkish prime minister and let him know that everything he saw indicated that he was very impressed with the ceremony and there was nothing to be concerned about."

Beaverstock also jumped in to say that "what we're discussing actually is, in fact, business for the government of Turkey and the government of Iraq...the government of Iraq is actually a sovereign nation and its external relations with its neighbors are its business and therefore it's for them to decide how they're going to deal with and respond to any overtures by the Turkish government." The problem, though, is that overture may come in the form of a military incursion. Andrew Lubin, from On Point, said that he'd heard the Kurds were shutting down the borders and not allowing Shiia Arabs, and to a lesser extent Sunni Arabs, to come into the region for fear that they would further destabilize the area. The generals said that if that was happening, they'd not heard about it. But the bloggers seemed pretty confident that such action was, in fact, taking place. I asked if there was any military to military contact between U.S. forces in Kurdistan and the Turkish forces on the other side of the border. Cichowski said there is a Turkish military liaison "who eats and sleeps over at Camp Victory and is a member of the Coalition operations cell." And Blackfive's Grim asked if there would be any change in force levels in Kurdistan due to the handoff. Cichowski said there wouldn't be, just a change in status. Now American forces will have to coordinate with the regional authorities before conducting any operations. All in all, it seems that the generals don't seem very worried about the prospect of a Turkish intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan, and neither does the American press for that matter. Perhaps that should tell us something about the likelihood of such an event. But, the AP reports today that "Turkey's military, building up troops on the Iraqi border, said Thursday it was ready to launch a cross-border offensive to fight Kurdish guerrillas--pressuring the government to support the idea which could strain ties with Washington and lead to tensions with Iraqi Kurds." Not a good sign.