Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, PA
Oct 14 2007

Kurds don’t fear Turks

By Betsy Hiel
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, October 14, 2007

QANDIL MOUNTAINS, Iraq — Along a winding road near the border with
Turkey, Kurdish shepherds watch over goats, sheep and cows as a
family picnics along a creek.
On the hillside just past a military checkpoint, a face is painted in
blue and black hues on a white concrete slab.

The face is of Abdullah Ocalan and the checkpoint is manned by his
Kurdish Workers’ Party, better known by its Kurdish initials, PKK.

Ocalan has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999 for leading the PKK’s
two-decade separatist war against the Turks. After months of
escalating cross-border attacks, Turkey is threatening to invade
Iraq’s Kurdish north to destroy PKK guerrillas based there.

It has mobilized on the border in recent weeks since the PKK killed
15 of its soldiers.
PKK fighters, assault rifles slung over their shoulders, snap to
attention as acting PKK leader Murat Karayilan steps into the
cement-block checkpoint. He sounds unconcerned about an invasion.

"Turkey has launched hundreds of raids in the last 25 years,"
Karayilan says. "… Even when the Turkish military stayed for two
months, they couldn’t get the results they wanted and they withdrew."

Yet the threat has provoked a strong reaction from the United States
because it could destabilize the only relatively quiet region of
Iraq, catch U.S. troops in the crossfire and shatter Washington’s
shaky relationship with Turkey, a longtime ally.

For its part, Iraq signed an anti-terrorism agreement with Turkey a
week ago and urges a political resolution to the PKK crisis.

And with Baghdad’s weak central government beset by sectarian
violence, the Kurdish Regional Government — which rules northern
Iraq with near-total autonomy — has offered to deal directly with
Turkey.

Turkey has rejected that and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, has said he will seek parliamentary approval for an invasion
in coming days.

"A Turkish invasion is definitely possible," says Richard May of the
World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information and a
former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They’ve
spent millions of dollars to move people and equipment from all over
Turkey."

He sees the buildup as "in line with their previous incursions into
northern Iraq."

More than 30,000 people have died in the fighting between Turkey and
its Kurdish guerrillas. Although the PKK insists it is only defending
the rights of Turkish Kurds, the United States and the European Union
consider it a terrorist group.

Human Rights Watch is critical of Turkey, too, describing its
campaign against the PKK in the 1980s and ’90s as "marked by scores
of ‘disappearances’ and extrajudicial executions" and saying about
3,000 Kurdish villages were "virtually wiped from the map."

Larger fears of separatists

After Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003, the situation briefly looked
promising.

Iraqi Kurds encouraged Turkish businessmen to invest in their region.
Today, 80 percent of northern Iraq’s construction boom is overseen by
Turkish companies, and annual cross-border trade is estimated at $5
billion.

If the Turks invade, "they will put their own interests at risk,"
says Sarhang Barzainji, an associate professor at Salahideen
University in Erbil, the region’s largest city. "Kurdistan is a big
market for Turkey."

Turkey has a larger fear, though — one shared by anti-U.S. regimes
in the neighborhood.

Iraqi Kurds’ post-Saddam autonomy has inspired Kurdish separatists in
Iran, Syria and Turkey. If Iraqi Kurds gain control of the oil-rich
Kirkuk area, Turkey fears they will split from Iraq and encourage
Turkey’s sizable, restive Kurdish minority to split off, too.

Although many Iraqi Kurds object to their mountains being used as a
PKK base, they still sympathize with Turkish Kurds.

"The Iraqi Kurdish leadership looks at the PKK as a Kurdish faction
and doesn’t want to betray them," says newspaper editor Azad Seddiq,
an Iraqi Kurd. "I think they hope to convince the Americans to make
the PKK a political force and give them … asylum."

That sentiment is echoed by Nawzad Mawlood, Erbil’s governor.

"There are Kurds in Turkey, and they are asking for their rights," he
says. "There should be a political solution."

Asos Hardi, who edits a weekly independent Kurdish newspaper,
believes Turkey is using the PKK as a pretext.

"The PKK is not their main problem. They are afraid of what happens
with the Iraqi Kurds," he says, calling it "a case of Kurdish phobia.
Even if there are no PKK in the mountains, Turkey is still thinking
to invade" northern Iraq.

Tough terrain for a fight

This mountainous region, where the PKK and an Iranian-Turkish
guerrilla group known as PJAK operate, is tough terrain, with peaks
of more than 11,000 feet. An Islamic terrorist group, Ansar Al Islam,
used it as a base to attack Iraqi Kurds before the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion. Kurdish troops routed Ansar only after U.S. airstrikes.

The Iraqi government never had firm control over the region, says
Mawlood. "Even Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons couldn’t get
people out of that area."

Gen. Mam Rostum, a commander of the Iraqi-Kurdish militia, the
peshmerga, agrees. His own fabled fighters might not dislodge the
PKK, he says, "because of the topography, and the PKK is fighting
with guerrilla-warfare tactics."

Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkish politics at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, agrees that Iraqi Kurds sympathize
with the PKK’s Kurdish nationalism. But he thinks "they are failing
to take into account how serious the Turks are right now."

‘We cannot give up’

PKK leader Karayilan insists Turkey’s current saber-rattling is
prompted not by his group’s attacks, but by the growing political
power of Iraq’s Kurds.

"We do not believe we can solve the problem through armed struggle,"
he says. "We believe we can move in a political arena."

For the PKK, that means political asylum for its members, the release
of the imprisoned Ocalan, and full cultural and political freedom for
Turkish Kurds.

Karayilan admits Turkey has eased some of its restrictions on Kurds,
allowing them to use their native language and establish private
language schools.

But, he says, "The Turkish state wants two things from us: Give up
and go to Turkish prison, or we will destroy you. As a Kurdish
people, we cannot give up."

———————————————— —————-

U.S.-Turkey relations at all-time low

Turkey’s threat to invade northern Iraq and attack PKK guerrillas
comes when U.S.-Turkish relations are at an all-time low.

It further complicates already-strained U.S. plans in the region,
including efforts to end sectarian violence across Iraq and to
isolate Washington’s regional arch-nemesis, Iran.

A recent Pew opinion poll showed only 9 percent of Turks hold a
positive view of the United States while 28 percent look favorably on
Iran.

"Iran is using the PKK as a public-relations tool to get into Turks’
hearts," says Dr. Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkish politics at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They have changed
hundreds of years of deep-rooted (Turkish-Iranian) animosity. It just
shows you how the PKK is a wedge issue."

Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally since the Cold War, infuriated
Washington by refusing to allow U.S. forces to cross its border into
northern Iraq during the 2003 invasion. As a result, U.S. troops and
equipment remained at sea on transport ships.

Relations were strained still more last week when the U.S. House
Foreign Affairs Committee voted to classify Turkey’s massacre of
Armenian Christians at the end of World War I as an act of genocide,
despite strong counter-lobbying by Turkish officials and the Bush
administration. The House is set to debate the measure in November.

Turkey has hinted it may retaliate by limiting U.S. air access to its
territory and to the U.S. airbase at Incirlik, a major supply hub for
U.S. forces in Iraq.

An invasion could deliver yet another blow to the U.S. war plan in
Iraq, according to Richard May of the World Security Institute: It
could draw-off some 10,000 Iraqi-Kurdish peshmerga fighters
supporting U.S. forces in Baghdad.

"The Kurdish military are extremely significant. … The Sunnis feel
more comfortable with them than (with) the Shia, and the U.S. forces
like and trust them," says May, a former Army officer who served in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If the Turkish military does launch a military incursion into
northern Iraq, these Kurdish soldiers will have their loyalties
pulled."

While the Kurdish peshmerga are not a "linchpin" of the U.S. military
strategy, May says "the loss of one soldier, let alone 10,000, will
have an impact."

Betsy Hiel is a Middle East correspondent for the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review. She can be reached at hielb@yahoo.com.

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