BLACKSNAKE’S LAIR: KURDISH REBELS ARE STIRRING UP TURKEY AND IRAN, AND THREATENING THE ONE CALM PART OF IRAQ
By Michael Hastings; With Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen in Istanbul and Michael Hirsh in Washington
Newsweek
October 9, 2006
International Edition
>From deep in the hills
Murat Karayilan prefers to travel in darkness. Under cover of a
starry night, the Kurdish guerrilla chief’s white Nissan Pathfinder
crawls up a narrow gravel road in Iraq’s mountainous far north, only
the headlights giving his presence away. Karayilan–his last name
translates to "blacksnake"–is a hunted man. Across the eastern border,
Iran’s anti-U.S. leaders would like nothing better than to see him
jailed or dead. To the west, America’s longtime allies in the Turkish
government likewise hate and fear him. The U.S. State Department
and the European Union both list his group, the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK), as a terrorist organization. "We are not terrorists,"
says Karayilan, ensconced in a sparsely furnished dwelling with a
stone floor. "The U.S. has seen us through the eyes of our enemies. We
want you to see us as friends. We are not attacking, we are defending
ourselves."
The invasion of Iraq opened a whole Pandora’s box of destabilizing
forces–among them, a surge of nationalism among the estimated 36
million Kurds who hail from the land that stretches from Turkey and
Syria in the west, to Iraq and Armenia in the east. The PKK, which
fought Turkey in a vicious war that cost 37,000 lives from 1987 to
1999, abandoned its truce two years ago, after the fall of Saddam
Hussein. The rebels still see themselves as standing up against
centuries of often brutal repression. This year the Kurdish group
has staged more than 250 attacks on Turkish security forces, in one
bloody week killing 14 Turkish soldiers, a toll unmatched since the
worst of the fighting in the ’90s. In recent weeks the violence has
escalated, as everyone tries to inflict as much damage as possible
before winter snows interrupt the war. Last week Turkey shelled
three Iraqi villages near the border town of Zaho, according to the
government of Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran’s artillery was busy as well,
killing a villager near the town of Hakurk. For its part, the PKK
and its allies have been blamed for at least eight bombings across
Turkey and for the kidnapping of a local official’s son.
U.S. and Iraqi officials worry that the fighting will spin out of
control. Ankara threatens to launch cross-border raids to get rid of
the rebels, and the guerrillas themselves say Iranian jets and ground
forces have crossed the border more than once this year. Even as U.S.
forces struggle to contain the chaos and violence everywhere else in
Iraq, the danger now is that the fires could spread to the Kurdish
north and beyond. No one was very impressed by the PKK’s declaration
of a unilateral ceasefire over the weekend. At least four previous
ceasefires have failed, and last week Turkey issued a pre-emptive
dismissal of any PKK peace offer. "The PKK usually hibernate over the
winter," says one Turkish diplomat. "When spring comes, they are up
to their usual business again." Everyone knows the hunger for Kurdish
rights is not going away.
The PKK is the only authority in its corner of Iraqi Kurdistan. To
get there you climb a winding road where even the shepherds carry
AK-47s, into the Qandil Mountains, a stretch of high peaks straddling
the borderlands of Iraq, Turkey and Iran. The last Iraqi government
checkpoint is at the foot of the mountains, guarded by soldiers
from Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government. It flies the flag of Iraqi
Kurdistan, a yellow sunburst on a field of green, white and red. The
flag at the next checkpoint, almost two miles above sea level,
belongs to the PKK: a red star on yellow sun outlined in green. Armed
guerrillas make sure no one goes farther without official permission
from their central command. Around the bend, an immense portrait has
been painted on the rocky hillside–the face of the PKK’s founder,
Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan–Apo, his followers call him–launched the PKK in 1978 as a
Marxist organization opposing Turkish rule. By the 1980s, the group’s
fighters were hanging out with Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation
Organization and making pilgrimages to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, then a
hive of anti-U.S. terrorism. Back home in Turkey they applied their
newly acquired terrorist skills, attacking schools and government
offices until 1999, when Turkish commandos captured Ocalan. He was
tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and his group
declared a unilateral ceasefire.
Ocalan’s successor as chief of daily operations, Karayilan, has nothing
but praise for American ideals. He spoke glowingly to NEWSWEEK about
democracy and human rights and "Mr. Bush’s new Middle East project." He
says his 7,000 armed fighters could be a valuable ally for the United
States against Islamic fundamentalism. The Kurdish people in general
tend to be enthusiastically pro-American, unlike most Turks. In a
recent Turkish opinion survey, only 22 percent of the respondents said
they support the United States, versus 43 percent who favored Iran.
There’s an even stronger reason many Americans might be tempted to back
the PKK: "We’re in a war situation with Iran," says Essat Farasan, a
senior PKK officer. The group’s two-year-old Iranian sibling, the Free
Life Party (PJAK, pronounced "peshak"), claims some 1,500 guerrillas
along the Iranian border from Azerbaijan to Iraq, armed with machine
guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK-47s. Persecution of
Kurds in Iran has intensified since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took power
a year ago, says one of the group’s commanders, Zinair Mustafa, 34,
in an interview at a base camp in the Qandil Mountains. Zinair says
the Americans just wink at PJAK’s operations. U.S. forces visited
the area a year ago, he says; they reached the first PJAK checkpoint
and promptly turned back. But that’s the limit of U.S. assistance,
the Kurds say. "We have the same enemy as the U.S., but they do not
extend help to us," PJAK’s leader, Abdul Rahman Haji Ahmadi, told
NEWSWEEK in a phone interview from his exile home in Germany.
Still, local support for PJAK is rising. At a border crossing near the
Iraqi town of Pejwin, Kurdish smugglers gather around an open fire,
eating bread and tomatoes grilled on the embers. They say they began
hearing about the PJAK earlier this year. "I started to like them
when I heard they killed eight of those Iranian sons of bitches,"
says a 40-year-old Iranian Kurd who gives his name only as Faris. He
and his friends say they haven’t done anything to help the PJAK–but
they wouldn’t betray them, either.
For now, America is walking a careful line between two crucial allies:
the Turkish government and the Iraqi Kurds. To make matters even
more difficult, the PKK has spawned a splinter group, the Kurdistan
Freedom Falcons. Over the course of the summer at least 28 people died,
including four tourists, in Falcons bomb attacks on Turkish resort
towns. The PKK condemned the targeting of civilians, and Karayilan
says his group has "no control" over the Falcons.
Nevertheless, PKK leaders predict more such attacks unless Kurdish
demands are met–and both Turkish and American security officials
blame the PKK for the bombings. Under pressure from Ankara, Washington
has named retired Gen. Jos-eph Ralston as "anti-PKK coordinator,"
to work on a plan for disarming the group.
In August the Iraqi government announced that all PKK offices
would be shut down. The Baghdad branch soon reopened. The one in
Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, Suleimaniya, never closed. A serious
Iraqi crackdown on the PKK would almost surely set off a revolt
among Iraq’s Kurds, who fiercely believe in the vision of a greater
Kurdistan. PKKleaders say they aren’t afraid, either. "If the Turkish
Army comes to Iraq, they will lose the battle," says the Blacksnake.
"They have lost 100 times already." But the Turks aren’t giving up,
either. The chances of the violence escalating are as great as ever.