The peshmergas, sent from the Kurdish province of Dahuk further north, will undergo training throughout July at the Al-Ghazlani camp in Mosul, Khabat reported.

The KDP's television KTV reported June 15 that US army officers had started training Arabs and Kurds for the new Iraqi army at another camp on the edge of Dahuk.

The KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which have controlled Iraqi Kurdistan since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, together command more than 50,000 peshmergas, a number that doubles if reservists are counted.

Officials from both sides have said they hope their men will be integrated into a reconstituted Iraqi army following the US-led coalition's dissolution of Saddam Hussein's military.

They expect Kurds to be entrusted with the task of guarding Iraq's borders with Iran, Turkey and Syria as well as with other duties inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

Fighters of the KDP and PUK, both of which allied themselves with coalition forces that ousted Saddam's regime in April, were exempted from a coalition order to Iraqi militias to lay down their weapons by mid-June.

The exemption applies to three northern provinces under Kurdish control.

US civil administrator Paul Bremer said on Tuesday that inductions into the new Iraqi army would start by the middle of the month.

The army -- intended to become 10,000-strong within a year -- would be "motorized, lightly armed, largely directed at defending Iraq's borders ... It will not have internal security duties," he told reporters in Baghdad.

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