By Kim Murphy
Chicago Tribune, 27 October 2006
Driving north through these folded, wheat-colored mountains, it is easy to forget you are in Iraq.
Miles to the south, the Iraqi flags disappear, replaced by the flags of Kurdistan, a state that does not officially exist. Here in the northern mountains, though, even the symbols of the Iraqi Kurdish authority are nowhere to be seen.
Most of the flags here are those of the Kurdistan Workers Party — the PKK, listed by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in a separatist campaign across the border in Turkey. Deep in the mountains, all the road checkpoints are operated by PKK guerrillas. A giant portrait of imprisoned guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan stretches across a rocky slope.
The fact that much of Iraq's rugged northern borderlands with Turkey and Iran are under the day-to-day control of a militant organization might come as a surprise to those who thought U.S. forces had handed over authority nationwide to a new Iraqi government.
The PKK's guerrilla camps, ordered closed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki last month, still dot some of the steep valleys and ravines near the group's makeshift headquarters here; at least half the offices of its political affiliate, the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, also remain open.
The efforts to rein in the PKK are a new and strategically important front in the Bush administration's campaign to create a new Middle East, and one of the most complicated political problems U.S. forces face in Iraq. Kurdish leaders, for instance, have battled the PKK over the years in various intramural squabbles, but have been reluctant to clamp down on the group because of its popularity among the Kurdish public and out of sympathy for Kurds in Turkey.
Founded three decades ago as a violent Marxist resistance movement battling for independence of Kurds in Turkey, the PKK began a concerted paramilitary campaign in 1984. It since has mellowed its politics but still fields a force of as many as 6,000 guerrillas along the Iraqi-Turkish border, with about 1,000 of them well within Iraq, government officials estimate.
Within Turkey, violence connected with Kurdish separatists has escalated this year. In August, a group calling itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons claimed responsibility for several bomb attacks aimed at tourists that killed three people and injured dozens in Turkish coastal resorts. The group is widely believed to be an urban guerrilla offshoot of the PKK. The PKK has concentrated on attacking Turkish soldiers, using bases in northern Iraq as sanctuaries, according to the Turkish government.
In northern Iraq, the PKK militants get training in Shakespeare and Goethe, in the military tactics of the Thirty Years' War and how to operate a Russian-made BKC machine gun and a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher.
"We are here for one reason, and that is to obtain the objective of the freedom of our people of Kurdistan," said a doe-eyed young guerrilla who gave her name only as Ozgur and said she joined the movement when she was 13.
America's Kurdish dilemma stems from the fact that more than 20 million Kurds straddle the strategic borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.
Iraq's roughly 4 million Kurds are arguably the United States' strongest allies in the war-torn nation, and U.S. forces would almost surely face a political backlash in Baghdad if they took military action against guerrilla fighters many Kurds see as heroes.
Yet the Kurdish guerrilla force here is battling one of America's bedrock allies in the region — Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a stable, secular Muslim state in a region trending in other directions. The continuing failure to end PKK violence coming out of Iraq has driven Turkey toward a stronger security arrangement with Iran, which also faces militant Kurds along the Iraqi border, a relationship that can't help but be worrying for Washington.
"How important is the PKK as an issue? Let me tell you that it's important enough that the president of the United States decided that we needed a special envoy to counter the PKK and to try to get all of our efforts in the United States focused in the right direction, along with those of Turkey and Iraq," retired Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, recently appointed the U.S. special envoy to counter the PKK, said after a visit to the region late last month.
"We all believe that the use of force is the last resort, not the first resort," he said. "But having said that, that does not mean that we will not take military action. Quite the contrary: All options are on the table."
The continuing polarization of Iraq and the mounting sectarian violence there have only exacerbated worries among its neighbors about reverberations within the substantial Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iran and Syria.
Iraqi Kurdistan has moved steadily to distance itself from the violent skirmishing between Sunni and Shiite Arabs to the south; regional President Massoud Barzani's recent order to pull down the Iraqi flag on public buildings and replace it with the Kurdish flag is only one in a long line of moves to establish a truly autonomous Kurdish republic. Here in the north, there are Kurdish schools, Kurdish broadcast channels, Kurdish cellphone companies and a full-fledged Kurdish regional government.
Militant groups such as the PKK are demanding an end to repression of Kurds elsewhere, recognition of their national status and language and eventually some degree of political autonomy — measures that government leaders fear will open the door to demands for a Kurdish state, discarding the borders of four nations, a recipe for regional war.
That is why solving "the Kurdish question" has become a top priority for the U.S., and why tackling the PKK, its most militant face, has become step No. 1.
After Ralston's visit to the region, Iraqi leaders persuaded the PKK to declare a unilateral cease-fire, an end to the regular cross-border attacks that are claiming the lives of Turkish soldiers on a regular basis.
The PKK agreed, its leaders hoping the expression of goodwill could open the door to significant movement on Turkey's part, starting with an end to what it sees as human rights abuses, recognition of the Kurdish language and possibly amnesty for some PKK fighters who have not been involved in violence.
"I would like to say that the cease-fire has not been announced because of pressure at all," Cemil Bayak, a longtime leader of the group's most militant wing and a member of its ruling council, said in an interview over a lunch of grilled chicken and steaming vegetable stew at his mountain redoubt.
"The most important reason is that we want the Kurdish question to be solved peacefully, politically and by means of dialogue. This is what we want," said Bayak, who believed Turkey's bid to join the European Union would provide the impetus for human rights improvements needed to alleviate repression of the nation's Kurds. "We want violence to be put aside, and a new era to be opened on the issue."
But although the PKK has pledged to end its attacks on Turkish military targets, it is unclear whether the cease-fire will be embraced by other Kurdish militants, including the Falcons.
Turkish officials say the PKK is a terrorist organization that finances its activities through an international network of drug smuggling and human trafficking that reaches to Europe. Turkey is demanding the use of military force to disarm the PKK, but Iraq so far has refused, said Kosrat Rasoul Ali, vice president of the Kurdish regional government and a well-known former Kurdish peshmerga fighter.
"They want us to attack the PKK, they want us to crack down on the PKK," Ali said. "But it cannot be done. In the past we tried, but it was without result.
"We think that this problem cannot be solved with force," he said. "Because they are Kurds. It's very difficult for us Kurds to kill Kurds. In fact, it is impossible."
Ralston has refused to meet with PKK leaders, declaring, "We do not meet with terrorist groups." But Ali said Kurdish leaders hoped to broker a solution in which the PKK would disarm in exchange for guarantees on behalf of Kurds in Turkey.
"PKK is ready to hand over their weapons to the Americans, in return for several political steps by Turkey," Ali said. "Like a general amnesty to be published, to recognize Kurdish existence as a people in Turkey."
At the same time, some Iraqi officials believe Turkey and possibly Iran are behind some of the escalating violence in northern Iraq, especially in the city of Kirkuk, an oil center that Kurds hope to include within their federated republic, whose inclusion could form the basis for a powerful future Kurdistan economy.
In a pointed warning, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said last month that Iraq was prepared to support opposition groups within neighboring nations whose governments it saw as instigating violence in Iraq.
Recognizing that America's prime aim is to discourage the growing closeness of Turkey and Iran at a time when the U.S. is seeking to isolate Tehran, PKK leaders are arguing that solving the Kurdish question — the main issue that Turkey and Iran have in common — is the best way to accomplish that goal.
"If you cannot solve the Kurdish problem in Turkey, you cannot separate Turkey from Syria and Iran," Bayak said.
"And so without putting Turkey and the Kurds together, you cannot have the fundamental basis for this project of a new Middle East."
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Citation: Kim Murphy. "No easy answer to 'Kurdish question'," Chicago Tribune, 27 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-pkk27oct27,1,5721501.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
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