According to text from next year’s defence bill released Monday, at least $178m would go directly to ‘Kurdish and tribal security forces or other local security forces with a national security mission’

Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed directly underwriting the Kurdish peshmerga and Sunni irregular forces, rather than aiding US partners in the war against the Islamic State through the Iraqi government nominally controlling them.

At least $178m, and possibly as much as $429m, would go directly to “Kurdish and tribal security forces or other local security forces with a national security mission”, according to the text of next year’s half-trillion dollar defense authorization bill released on Monday by the House Armed Services Committee.

The bill, a critical legislative prerequisite for funding the US military, risks placing a wedge between the US and its ally in Baghdad and encouraging the sectarianism the provision seeks to prevent.

Unless the secretaries of state and defense jointly specify that the government of Iraq under US-backed Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi is including “ethnic and sectarian minorities within the security forces of Iraq”, the bill would block all of its proposed $715m in funding for the Iraqi security forces over the next year. US officials have testified that their retraining of the Iraqi military is critical to fielding a ground force capable of retaking the vast swaths of Iraqi territory Isis controls.

Should the specification of sectarian inclusion not arrive, 60% of the proposed funds, or $429m, would flow directly to the “Kurdish Peshmerga, the Sunni tribal security forces with a national security mission, and the Iraqi Sunni National Guard”.

Those military forces, according to the committee’s synopsis of the 500-page text, would “be deemed a country”, a highly unusual step that would both open up funding channels “to directly receive assistance from the United States” but with diplomatic implications.

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Among the conditions that Baghdad will have to meet to receive US military funding is “ending support to Shia militias and stopping abuses of elements of the Iraqi population by such militias”.

Those Shia militias, many of which are sponsored by Iran, have played key roles in fighting Isis, to include spearheading the recent monthlong battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit.

Even if the two senior officials make such a determination, the bill would still reserve $128m, or 25% of the proposed funding, for direct support to Kurdish and Sunni military forces.

Kurdish peshmerga, the armed forces of the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, have been among the most capable units combatting Isis. Yet their power is eyed warily by Iraqi Arabs, both Sunni and Shia, for signs of expanding Kurdish separatism. Similarly, the previous Shia-led government, controlled by the formerly US-backed Nouri al-Maliki, persecuted members of auxiliary Sunni security forces once paid for by the US military.

Accordingly, the Obama administration has opted to aid the peshmerga and any Sunni irregular forces primarily through a Baghdad government that is close with Washington adversary Iran, part of an awkward geopolitical alignment against Isis that is upending regional understandings of US alliances even outside of Barack Obama’s desired nuclear deal with Tehran.

Another element of the national defense authorization act (NDAA) seeks to undermine the Iran deal. It would authorize a “Sense of Congress” that dangers posed by Iran, to include sponsorship of terrorism and the fomenting of regional instability, will “likely increase under a Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action”.

Additionally, the bill proposes withholding a quarter of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s office budget should the administration not provide Congress with documents about the highly controversial 2014 trade of five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay for US prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl. The budgets of the military services and commands would be left untouched.