New Alignments: The Kurds’ Lonely Fight Against Islamic State Terror

NEW ALIGNMENTS: THE KURDS’ LONELY FIGHT AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE TERROR

By Ralf Hoppe, Maximilian Popp, Christoph Reuter and Jonathan Stock

Christian Werner/ DER SPIEGEL

The terrorist group PKK represents the West’s last hope in the fight
against Islamic State. Their lonely resistance to the advancing
jihadists will result in lasting changes to the region. Some
developments are already well advanced.

The headquarters of one the world’s mightiest terrorist organization
is located in the mountains northeast of Erbil, Iraq. Or is it the
nerve center of one of the Western world’s most crucial allies? It
all depends on how one chooses to look at the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK).

All visits to the site in northern Iraq’s Qandil Mountains must first
be authorized by PKK leaders, and the process is not immediate. But
after days of waiting, our phone finally rings. “Get ready, we’re
sending our driver,” the voice at the other end of the line says. He
picks us up in the morning and silently drives us up the winding roads
into the mountains. At one point, we pass the burned out remains of
a car destroyed by Turkish bombs three years ago, killing the family
inside. The wreckage has been left as a kind of memorial. The driver
points to it and breaks his silence. “Erdogan has gone nuts,” he says.

Just behind the Kurdish autonomous government’s final checkpoint, the
car rounds a bend in the road and suddenly Abdullah Ocalan’s iconic
moustache appears, part of a giant mural made of colored stones on
the opposite hillside. The machine-gun toting guards wear the same
mustache. “Do you have a permit, colleagues?” they ask.

Officially, we’re in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Really, though, it is a PKK state. A region of 50 square kilometers
(19 square miles) of rugged, mountainous territory, it provides a home
for PKK leadership in addition to training camps for fighters. It
also has its own police force and courts. The surrounding hillsides
are idyllic with their pomegranate trees, flocks of sheep and small
stone huts. But they are also dotted with Humvees, captured by the
PKK from the Islamic State terrorist militia, which had stolen them
from the Iraqi army.

It is here in the Qandil Mountains that PKK leaders coordinate their
fight against Islamic State jihadists in the Syrian town of Kobani and
in the Iraqi metropolis of Kirkuk in addition to the ongoing battle
in the Sinjar Mountains. Turkey, some fear, could soon be added to
the list.

A Preposterous Collaboration?

Just a few years ago, the idea of the West working together with the
Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan would have been preposterous. Over the past
three decades, PKK has been responsible for the deaths of thousands
of Turkish civilians, providing the US and the European Union ample
reason to keep the group on its lists of terrorist organizations. For
many in the West, however, these former outlaws have become solitary
heroes in the fight to save the Middle East from IS. With an estimated
size of 15,000 fighters, PKK is the strongest fighting force in the
region and the only one that seems willing and able to put up a fight
against Islamic State. They are disciplined and efficient in addition
to being pro-Western and secular.

The West would have preferred to rely on the PKK’s Kurdish rivals, the
100,000-strong Peshmerga force of the northern Iraq autonomous region.

But Peshmerga was overpowered by Islamic State. Furthermore, they have
little combat experience, a dearth of modern weaponry, insufficient
training and no central command. It isn’t really even a true army,
merely a hodgepodge of extracurricular clubs, partisan troops and
special units. In August, they ceded the Sinjar Mountains to IS
virtually without a fight, forcing thousands of Kurdish Yazidis to
flee. The Peshmerga retreated elsewhere too in the face of IS advances.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, the president of
northern Iraq, is essentially a family-run business with an associated
small state, as corrupt as it is conservative. The PKK, and its Syrian
counterpart YPG, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. The tightly
run cadre isn’t democratic, but neither is it corrupt — and in Kobani,
they are giving their all in the fight against Islamic State.

Indeed, it was the PKK that succeeded in establishing a protective
corridor in Sinjar that enabled tens of thousands of Yazidis to flee.

It was also PKK that defended the cities of Makhmour and Kirkuk in
Iraq against Islamic State militias.

The US Air Force is now air-dropping weapons for YPG fighters in
Kobani, while the German military is delivering bazookas to the
Peshmerga — and not to Kobani where they are far more urgently
needed. Everyone is assuring that these weapons won’t fall into
the hands of the PKK. Meanwhile, Turkey has acquiesced to allowing
Peshmerga fighters to join the fray in Kobani and politicians in
Europe and the United States are timidly considering removing PKK
from their lists of terrorist organizations. To many, it seems like
a necessary step when establishing a partnership with the PKK, even
if it would mean conflict with Turkey.

A Difficult Balancing Act

It’s a perplexing alliance in an abstruse conflict and it raises a
number of prickly issues. Is the delivery of weapons to the Kurds
a defensible strategy for the West? Is it even a moral obligation,
to prevent a massacre? And what happens if those weapons are then one
day used against Turkey? What happens if the Kurds’ growing political
and military self-confidence ultimately manifests itself in a demand
for independence?

It’s a difficult balancing act for the West. It has to ensure that the
Kurds win the battle of Kobani — not just to ward off IS, but also to
save a peace process between PKK and the Turkish government that has
been jeopardized by the conflict. At the same time, it wants to prevent
a broader Kurdish triumph that could destabilize the entire region.

It’s possible that the civil war in Syria and the fight against IS has
already planted the seeds of a Kurdish spring that could radically
shift the balance in the Middle East. Subjugated by foreign powers,
some 30 million Kurds, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslims, have
for years been fighting for recognition and for their own state in
Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq — mostly without success. Only once,
in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, did a Kurdistan province exist,
and it disappeared after just 20 years. After World War I, the Western
allies promised the Kurds they would be granted their own state,
but Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, didn’t keep the promise.

Turkey even refused to recognize the Kurds as an ethnic minority
and it banned their language and traditions. Kurds also faced
discrimination and repression in Iran, Syria and Iraq. The tragic
nadir of this persecution was the massacre at Halabja. In March 1988,
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered his air force to drop chemical
weapons on the city, killing up to 5,000 people in the attack.

A few decades later, Kurds today enjoy a broad degree of autonomy in
northern Iraq, even possessing their own government and army. Northern
Iraq has become both a model for, and the envy of, other Kurds in the
Middle East. It’s an interdenominational success, too, given that
Sunnis, Alevis, Yazidis and Christians peacefully coexist with one
another in what is the most stable and prosperous part of Iraq. With
upheaval taking place across the Middle East, Kurds in Syria and
Turkey are hoping to implement a similar model. Now, though, the Kurds
have become a primary target of the Islamic state, even though the
two groups share the same Sunni branch of Islam. It is precisely the
Kurds’ newfound strength that has placed them in the crosshairs of IS.

+++ The Qandil Mountains of Iraq: A Visit to PKK Leaders +++

After the driver passes the stone portrait of Ocalan, he applies the
brakes in front of a farmhouse. A short time later, PKK spokesman
Zagros Hiwa arrives. He inspects the cameras, collects our mobile
phones and closes the drapes. He then pulls a PKK flag out of a
plastic bag and hangs it on the wall. PKK often uses civilian homes,
with its leaders constantly changing locations.

Shortly thereafter, Sabri Ok enters the room with his body guard and
five fighters. The 58 year old has been a member of PKK since its
founding in 1978 and he’s part of the group’s top echelon. He spent
a total of 22 years in prison in Turkey, a stint which included an
extended hunger strike. Peace negotiations between PKK and Turkey have
been ongoing since 2012, but Ok says they will end if Kobani falls
to IS. Should that happen, attacks and violence will return in Turkey.

He warns that many young PKK supporters are itching for a fight. “The
new generation is different from us older people,” Ok says with
concern. “They are more radical. They have seen the war in Kurdistan
and their brothers and sisters have died in Syria. It will be difficult
to control them.”

Ok believes that Turkey is merely using the peace talks to buy time
and does not think that a peaceful solution is possible. “We’re not
a war-loving people, but the Kurdish question has to be resolved,” he
says. “It is absurd for North Kurdistan to conduct peace negotiations
while the same Kurds are being murdered by IS in Kobani with Turkish
support.” He claims that the Turks are providing IS with artillery and
money, that they are treating wounded jihadists and allowing fighters
to cross its borders into Syria. There is no proof of his allegations
about weapons and money, but the other claims are verifiable.

The YPG, he says, have been defending the city for 37 days. “Without
them,” he says, “Kobani would have already fallen 37 times by now.”

Last week, Turkey reached an agreement on sending 200 Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters from Iraq through Turkey and into Syria in order to help in
the battle to save Kobani, but Ok has little regard for the plan. “What
Peshmerga?” he asks, grinning. “I fought with the Peshmerga — that
was 30 years ago. But it is no longer the same army.

They’ve become weak. When people just sit around, they lose their
will to fight.” He says that weapons, medicine and ammunition are
needed in Kobani, not Peshmerga fighters.

He believes that PKK’s ongoing ban in Germany is unjustified. Doesn’t
the PKK share the same principles as the West, he asks? Things like
women’s rights, environmental protection and democracy? He discounts
the darker side of PKK — that involving contract killings, involvement
in the drug trade, kidnappings and terror attacks.

He then invites us to lunch for a meal of wild honey, chicken and
salad.

+++ Kirkuk, Iraq: The Front against IS +++

The old Saddam-era fortifications still encircle Kirkuk, built by
the dictator as a bulwark against the Kurds. Today, they are manned
by Peshmerga and PKK units, staring out at the black Islamic State
flag flying across from them.

The Iraqi army left Kirkuk months ago, leaving the Kurds to defend
the oil city on their own. Islamic State jihadists are now just a few
kilometers away. The PKK and Peshmerga have fought against in each
other in the past, but now they’re working together. During the day,
150 Peshmerga guard the front, with 300 PKK fighters taking over at
sundown. Most of the serious combat happens at night.

Their commander, Agid Kellary, is based a little further to the south
in Daquq. The PKK man has set up a make-shift office in a half-finished
apartment. An Iraqi army helicopter roars overhead and shots can be
heard. Kellary, a friendly and soft-spoken man who studied literature,
explains, “We’re in control here. If you don’t show any strength,
no one will respect you.”

Kirkuk is located on the important arterial between Erbil and Baghdad.

The area is flat, meaning that whoever has control of the city also
has control of the surrounding area. Bulldozers push large ramparts
around the camp and workers dig deep trenches behind the front. It
looks like they are planning to stay. Kellary says he’s looking
forward to winter, in the hopes that snow and mud will restrict IS
movements to major roadways, making them easier to stop.

But Islamic State is a powerful adversary, one with more than 30,000
fighters at its disposal, seemingly unlimited resources and modern
heavy weaponry, much of it captured in recent months. Most has been
seized from the Iraqi army, which was armed by the United States,
but some has also come from the Syrian regime. Last week, IS even
presented three fighter jets along with pilots, but it was likely just
propaganda, an area in which the jihadists have proven themselves to
be highly adept.

The next sentence that comes out of Commander Kellary’s mouth would
have been unfathomable only a few months ago. “We thank the Americans
for their help,” he says. “When they help us, they are also helping
themselves. We share the same enemy.” He says weapons deliveries
from Germany to the Peshmerga are also nice, but that it would be
more important for Berlin to finally abandon its support of Turkey.

Kellary says that, even as the battle of Kobani gets worldwide
coverage, the ongoing fight in the Sinjar Mountains has been virtually
ignored. “Our units are trapped, under constant fire — it’s the
heaviest fighting that I can recall,” he says. The corridor they
had been using just a few weeks ago to deliver food and humanitarian
assistance to the Yazidis in the mountains is now under Islamic State
control and the threat of another massacre is growing.

Heydar Shesho, commander of the Yazidi army in the mountains, sounds
a little desperate on the phone. “We are surrounded on all sides,” he
says. “Islamic State is attacking us with tanks and artillery. There
are still 2,000 families here. If no one helps us, we’re all going
to be killed.” There has been no air support from the US and no aid
deliveries, he says, before adding that they urgently need heavy
weaponry.

The Kurdish government has also dispatched a few hundred Peshmerga to
the mountains. “But you can forget about them,” Shesho says. “They
just wait around here and they don’t fight. They might as well just
fly home.”

+++ Omerli, Turkey: The Home of Ocalan’s Brother +++

Barring a visit to the prison where he is being held, the closest
you can get to the PKK’s leader is the village of Omerli on the
Turkish-Syrian border, 70 kilometers from Kobani. Abdullah Ocalan was
born and raised here, and it is the place that his younger brother
Mehmet still calls home.

The path to his house leads through a pistachio orchard to a simple
stone house. Garlands in the green, yellow and red of the Kurdish flag
hang from the ceiling bearing Abdullah Ocalan’s portrait. Memhet
Ocalan, 63, sits beneath them in a plastic chair. He bears an
unmistakable likeness to his brother, with the same compact stature,
slouching shoulders, coarse facial features and broad moustache.

Ocalan is a farmer and his hands are toughened from hard labor in
the fields. He wears simple clothing — a blue shirt, cloth pants
and sandals. He leads us into his living room, the walls of which
are also covered with photos of his brother and other PKK commanders.

The Ocalan family was poor and the parents couldn’t afford to send
all seven of their children to school. Mehmet never learned to read
and write while Abdullah went to school and proved to be a good pupil,
eventually making it to secondary school in Ankara. Mehmet Ocalan says
that politics was never a topic in his parents’ home. Their Kurdish
heritage didn’t play a role, either. The state denied that Kurds even
existed and for a time they were referred to as “mountain Turks”.

Their language was forbidden. The Ocalan family assimilated.

But Abdullah found himself searching for a direction and, for a while,
thought he had found it in Islam. He often frequented the mosque in
Diyarbakr, where he spent two years working in the land registry. He
saved his wages and he enrolled at Ankara University at the beginning
of the 1970s to study political science. It was an era in which left-
and right-wing groups often brawled and in which thousands of people
died in street battles.

Abdullah Ocalan went from being a devout Muslim to a Socialist, one
who admired both Marx and Mao. He also became involved in the left-wing
extremist movement and was sentenced to several months in prison, where
he became radicalized after seeing how other political prisoners were
tortured. He also began to focus more on the oppression of his people.

The PKK’s Armed Struggle

Following his release, Ocalan began propagating armed struggle in
the fight for an independent Kurdish state and founded a group that
ultimately gave birth to the PKK in 1978. His troops carried out
attacks, took hostages and murdered soldiers — but also killed
thousands of civilians, resulting in his group being placed on
European and American lists of terrorist organizations. Starting in
1977, Mehmet Ocalan didn’t see his brother for two entire decades,
preferring to stay in his home village and staying away from the PKK.

He suffered from Turkish state oppression nonetheless, with police
raiding his home repeatedly. He was also arrested and beaten in prison.

He certainly wasn’t alone. Thousands of Kurds were tortured in the
1980s, particularly in the military prison in Diyarbakir, known as
“Hell Nr. 5.” Guards would force prisoners to rape each other and
to climb into bathtubs full of feces; they ripped out their hair,
tore out their nails and zapped them with electric shocks.

It was nothing less than war between the PKK and Turkey. Turkish
soldiers lit entire villages on fire, shot farmers dead and raped
their wives; hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled their homes to escape
the violence. Mehmet Ocalan also had to leave his village of Omerli,
finding work in the fields on the Gulf of Iskenderun. He was only
able to return home many years later.

Initially, the PKK was not universally supported by the Kurdish
population, with many in the countryside unable to connect with its
Marxist-Leninist liberation ideology. Furthermore, Abdullah Ocalan was
brutal in his treatment of dissidents, pursuing suspected collaborators
across borders and even executing women and children.

But the ferocity of the Turkish military served to push many people
into the arms of the PKK.

Mehmet Ocalan gazes at a photograph of his brother in his hand. He
says he doesn’t reproach his brother for everything that happened.

“Abdullah did what he had to do,” he says. He adds that although he
isn’t political himself, he does support his brother’s fight.

The PKK leader was finally captured by the Turkish secret service
in 1999 in Kenya with CIA assistance. Initially, he was sentenced to
death for establishing a terrorist organization and for high treason,
but the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. For the last
15 years, he has been held in a high-security prison on the island
of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara. He is only allowed to leave his
cell once a day for an hour. For a long time, a radio was his only
connection to the world outside, though he has had a television for
the last two years. His lawyers say that he suffers from migraines
and has developed breathing difficulties.

Abdullah Ocalan’s Link to the Outside World

Mehmet recalls that Abdullah looked pale and seemed absent the first
time he was able to visit him in prison and that they were only
allowed to talk for 15 minutes. “You know that I did everything for
the Kurdish people,” Abdullah told his brother.

Now, though, Mehmet has become his brother’s most important connection
to the outside world. Though he shies away from public appearances,
Mehmet receives Kurdish politicians to discuss his brother’s ideas.

The two have never been able to talk without supervision during their
meetings in Irmali, with security personnel constantly present, Mehmet
says. Still, they spend much of their time talking about political
issues, following Abdullah’s initial questions regarding the family’s
wellbeing. At their last meeting in early October, Mehmet says his
brother was riled up, fearful that the Turkish government was in the
process of torpedoing the peace process.

Ankara began secret talks with the PKK in 2009 in Oslo. But it wasn’t
until the fall of 2011 that Turkish government officials approached
Abdullah Ocalan, realizing that any peace agreement would have to bear
his signature. Mehmet says his brother agreed to the negotiations
with Ankara because he realized that the guerilla war had not been
successful in guaranteeing more rights and freedoms for the Kurds.

The talks, by contrast, have resulted in significant improvements.

Kurds are now allowed to use their language in schools and Kurdish
newspapers and television channels have been established. Many Kurds
are also more prosperous, having profited from the economic boom
and from government investment in their region, which had long been
neglected. In the summer, parliament in Ankara passed a law aimed at
making it easier for PKK fighters to return from the Qandil Mountains,
a move Abdullah Ocalan welcomed as an “historic initiative.” An end
to the decades-long conflict appeared nigh.

But Mehmet says the PKK now finds itself at a crossroads. His brother
said he can only continue the talks if Erdogan ceases his support for
the Islamic State, but Ankara appears to be pursuing a schizophrenic
approach to the Kurds at the moment. To that end, Erdogan recently
compared the PKK to Islamic State and he is still blocking any kind
of aid for Kobani. It looks as though the Turkish president is hoping
that the Kurds will be satisfied with a minimal compromise — pushed
through by Abdullah Ocalan so that he can get out of prison and,
perhaps, so that he will go down in history as a peacemaker rather
than a terrorist. But it is a risky gamble that has strengthened
radical elements. “My brother alone is to thank for the fact that the
conflict has not yet escalated,” Mehmet says. How much longer people
will continue listening to him remains an open question.

+++ Diyarbakir, Turkey: The Younger Generation +++

Ulas Yasak, a young PKK activist, is sitting in a windowless room in
a concrete building on the outskirts of Diyarbakir, smoking filterless
cigarettes and waiting. There are several Kurdish-language newspapers
on the table in front of him and a poster of Abdullah Ocalan hangs
on the wall. “I am ready to go on the attack,” he says.

With his gaunt, sunken cheeks and scruffy beard, Yasak looks much
older than his 30 years. He used to fight for the PKK in northern Iraq,
but he is now the commander of the Group of Communities in Kurdistan
(KCK), a PKK sub-group focused on establishing a parallel society,
with its own schools, security forces and judiciary.

Yasak, who prefers to keep his real name secret, is illustrative of
a generational conflict currently threatening to split the Kurdish
movement. Young Kurds seem determined to take the fight to the streets
and have engaged in battles with Turkish security forces in recent
weeks. Indeed, nationwide protests at the beginning of October
resulted in 20 deaths, with the scene reminiscent of the 1990s,
when the conflict between Turks and Kurds devastated the region.

Just the night before, Yasak tells us, he met with his comrades to
discuss what they should do if Turkey continues standing by as Kurds
are slaughtered by Islamic State militants in Kobani. “Our leadership
advises us to remain calm. But my people are losing their patience.”

Erdogan, he says, sought to use the negotiations with PKK to win over
Kurdish voters, but the situation in Kobani shows that reconciliation
was not his main priority.