Independent : Iraqi Kurdish leader defies Turkish invasion threat

Iraqi Kurdish leader defies Turkish invasion threat

By Patrick Cockburn in Iraqi Kurdistan | October 29, 2007

Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurds of northern Iraq, expressed defiance yesterday in the face of a threatened invasion by 100,00 Turkish troops, and was scornful of Turkey's claim that it wants only to pursue Turkish-Kurd rebels.

"We are not a threat to Turkey and I do not accept the language of threatening and blackmailing from the government of Turkey," he said from his mountain fortress of Salahudin 10 miles north of Arbil. "If they invade there will be war."

Mr Barzani is President of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq which enjoys quasi-independence from Baghdad and has stronger military forces than half of the members of the UN.

He was in no mood to buckle under Turkish pressure to take military action against the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who have their hideouts in the mountain ranges along Iraqi Kurdistan's borders with Iran and Turkey. "My main mission would be not to allow a Kurdish-Kurdish fight to happen within the Kurdish liberation movement," he declared.

Mr Barzani said Turkey's attempt to solve its Kurdish problem by military means alone had not worked in the past 23 years and would not work now. It was in 1984 that the PKK took up arms, seeking independence or autonomy from theTurkish state that refused to admit that it had a Kurdish minority of 15 million.

Mr Barzani also said that he was increasingly convinced that the Turkish objective was not the PKK but Iraqi Kurdistan, which has achieved near-independence since 2003. He said he was convinced Turkey's claim that its target was the PKK "is only an excuse and the target is the Kurdistan region itself". When the KRG put its peshmerga (soldiers) on the border with Turkey to control the areas where the PKK has sought refuge, Turkish artillery had shelled them, he said.

Mr Barzani appears to believe there is no concession he could offer to Turkey which would defuse the crisis because he himself and the KRG are the true target of Ankara.

Turkish military action might be largely symbolic with ground troops not advancing very far, but even this would have a serious impact on the economy of the KRG. The Iraqi Kurds would also be badly hurt if Turkey closed the Habur Bridge, the crossing point near Zakho through which passes much of Kurdistan's trade. Some 825,000 trucks crossed the bridge in both directions last year. Asked what the impact of the closure of Habur Bridge would be on Iraqi Kurdistan, Mr Barzani said determinedly: "We would not starve."

Turkish artillery is already firing shells across the border in the high mountains around Kani Masi, a well-watered border village in western Kurdistan, famous for its apple orchards. The shelling is persistent and is evidently designed as warning to the Iraqi Kurds. "We are afraid but we have nowhere else to go," said Mohammed Mustafa, an elderly farmer.

For the moment, the villagers are staying put. Many of them in this area are Syriac Christians whose parents or grandparents emigrated to Baghdad but had returned recently because of fear of sectarian killing in the capital. Omar Mai, the local head of Mr Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party in Kani Masi, said that seven villages in the area had recently been shelled.

He said that there were no PKK in the villages and that they stayed permanently in the high mountains. Another reason for the PKK guerrillas making themselves scarce in this area is that there are Turkish outposts and garrisons already inside Iraq, set up during previous incursions. At one point near the village of Begova the snouts of Turkish tanks point menacingly down the road.

Driving to the top of a mountain where peshmerga were dug in, Mr Mai explained with some pride the intricate geography of the frontier. On one hilltop below us was the Turkish army, identifiable by the red Turkish flag, while a few hundred yards below the hill, separated by a flimsy fence, were Iraqi Kurdish frontier guards living in a long white barracks. In a grove of trees behind this building was a villa that was also occupied by Turkish troops.

Further north, hidden by folds in the mountains, are the Turkish guns that intermittently bombard this area. If the Turkish army does want to advance here there is not much to stop them, but it is unlikely that they would find any PKK, scanty in number and well-hidden in caves, in this vast range of mountains and valleys.

Independent : Turkey reluctantly prepares for attack on Kurds

Turkey reluctantly prepares for attack on Kurds

It is a war few in the region want to happen, apart from the PKK guerrillas and militant factions in the Turkish army

By Patrick Cockburn on the Iraq-Turkey border | 28 October 2007

The rebels of the Turkish-Kurd PKK movement are the only guerrillas in the world who can be seen from space. Clearly visible to any satellite passing over their headquarters in the Kandil mountains is a giant portrait picked out in painted stones of the PKK's captive leader, Abdullah Ocalan, regarded with cult-like devotion by his followers.

Ignored by the outside world for years, during which they hid in the valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan, the guerrillas looked bemused last week by the number of journalists who had made the trek into the mountains to speak to them. It was a PKK attack early last Sunday morning in which 16 Turkish soldiers were killed and eight captured that led to the Turkish government threatening to invade northern Iraq in pursuit of the Turkish Kurd rebels.

It is not a war anybody wants, apart from the PKK and militant factions within the Turkish army. The PKK was defeated in its battle for independence or at least autonomy for Turkey's 15 million Kurds after a bloody war fought between 1984 and 1999. A Turkish invasion might enable it to regain its political popularity among Turkish Kurds.

The Turkish army, or at least some of its leaders, also has a vested interest in escalating the long-running struggle. This is the army's strongest card in trying to maintain its authority in the state in opposition to the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose AK party was re-elected in July.

There is no doubt that the PKK did carry out last Sunday's attack. But the Iraqi Kurds believe – and it is a view supported by diplomats in Ankara – that at least some of the recent attacks on Turkish security forces were the work of an extreme faction within the Turkish army. The PKK denies, for instance, that it carried out a raid in which 12 village guards – a pro-government home guard – were shot dead in Beytussebap recently. The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, also points out that the PKK is notoriously riddled with Turkish agents.

It is a strange crisis because Mr Erdogan, for all his threats to send 100,000 Turkish soldiers in pursuit of the PKK, is doing everything to avoid an attack. He has pointed out that the 24 previous Turkish invasions of Iraq have achieved little and the 3,000 PKK guerrillas can easily hide in caves and bunkers until the Turks have left. An attack would anger the US, the Iraqi government, the Kurdistan regional government and the Turkish Kurds who voted for Mr Erdogan in July.

The Iraqi government is a weak player in all this because it does not control the north of Iraq, which is firmly under the authority of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Not surprisingly, Turkish-Iraqi talks in Ankara aimed at averting an invasion collapsed on Friday.

Mr Erdogan is off to see President George Bush in Washington in 10 days' time, but the US is disinclined to become embroiled with Turkey through which come much of the military supplies for the US army in Baghdad. The KRG is the only force in Iraq capable of acting against the guerrillas, but Turkey refuses to talk to its leaders, essentially because they are Kurds.

There is also a suspicion among Iraqi Kurds that it is they and not the minnows of the PKK who will be the real target of a Turkish invasion. Turkey has watched with dismay since 2003 as the Iraqi Kurds created what is in effect the first de facto independent Kurdish state that is stronger than half the members of the UN.

A referendum in Kirkuk mandated by the Iraqi constitution should take place by the end of this year, though it may now be delayed, and a vote would probably lead to the oil-rich province joining the KRG. Such a result is anathema to Turkey but it is not clear what it could do to stop it.

For all Mr Erdogan's efforts to talk tough but delay military action, another attack would make it impossible for him to avoid ordering an incursion. There are those in the PKK or the Turkish army who will make sure that just such a provocation does take place.

Independent : PKK tactics may drive Turkey into a reluctant invasion

PKK tactics may drive Turkey into a reluctant invasion

By Patrick Cockburn in the Qandil mountains, northern Iraq | 26 October 2007

Soon after midnight last Sunday, a detachment of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) surrounded a 50-strong unit of the Turkish army near the village of Daglica in Hakkari province, three miles from Turkey's border with Iraq.

The operation was well planned. The PKK guerrillas first cut the electricity and telephone lines to the Turkish army post and then isolated it by blowing up a bridge. The besieged soldiers could see the PKK taking up positions through their night-vision equipment and monitored their radio communications.

When the PKK did attack it overran the outpost, killing at least 16 Turkish soldiers, wounding 17 and capturing eight whom the PKK still holds. The PKK claims only three of its men were slightly wounded and later released pictures of the Turkish prisoners.

It was the most effective PKK action for years and the Turkish government's reaction to it has re-launched the PKK as a political player in the region. It is no longer an irrelevant relic of its failed bid to lead the 15 million Turkish Kurds to independence which collapsed after its military defeat in the 1990s and the capture of its leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999.

Sunday's attack had an explosive impact on Turkey because the Turkish army and its civilian supporters are eager to persuade Turks that the moderate Islamist government is insufficiently patriotic. For his part, the Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan had been skilfully threatening to send the army across the border but not in fact doing so.

Talking to PKK leaders in their headquarters in the Qandil mountains it is not clear how far they are trying to tempt Turkey into a trap by provoking it into invading northern Iraq. A Turkish invasion would be much in the PKK's interests since the Turkish army would become embroiled with the powerful military forces of the Iraqi Kurds.

The PKK leaders do not feel themselves in much danger. The mountains and gorges have been a redoubt for guerrillas for thousands of years. "Nobody can get us out of here," says Bozan Tekin, a PKK leader, pointing to the mountain walls surrounding the cluster of stone houses where we met. He claimed that Alexander the Great had been balked by the mountains of Kurdistan and suggested the Turks would be no more successful.

The natural defences of the Qandil are impressive. We started in the plain below the mountains in the village of Sangassar and then drove along the side of steep hills, dotted with small oak trees, which fall away on one side to form a gorge.

At the top of a pass we entered PKK territory, the entrance to which is guarded by a series of checkpoints and PKK fighters in uniform. They told us to keep straight on to the village of Kurtak and not to divert off the road. Diversions were not tempting since the only side roads are rutted paths leading further into the mountains. Houses are few though nomads herding sheep had pitched their tents by the streams and were gathering firewood.

One of several difficulties facing a Turkish invasion force is that they are unlikely to locate the PKK in this wilderness of mountains. The place we met Bozan Tekin was miles away from the nearest PKK camp which, say local sources, can only be reached after an hour in a vehicle and seven or eight hours trek on foot. The base itself consists of scattered houses hidden in a cleft between the rocks.

But the strength of the PKK position has less to do with geography and more to do with the politics of the region. Since it was founded in 1978 the PKK has always benefited from Ankara's refusal to recognise that there is a Kurdish minority and the stifling of all means of constitutional protest. It still does.

Militarily, the PKK are not very strong. The figure given for its forces inside northern Iraq is about 3,000. They claim that they have been trying to abide by a ceasefire since 1 October 2006, but it is a curiously flexible ceasefire that includes the right of self-defence and retaliation. The PKK's pin-prick attacks do not have much military impact on the 100,000 Turkish soldiers massed north of the border. But they do inflict serious political damage on the Turkish government because any Turkish casualties drive it towards an invasion of Iraq that it does not want to carry out.

There is a further problem for Turkey that is also largely of its own making. The only Iraq force capable of evicting the PKK from its mountains is the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) led by Massoud Barzani. But Turkey refuses to recognise the KRG because it is Kurdish and will only deal with the Iraqi government in Baghdad which, as one observer put it, has "about as much influence in Iraqi Kurdistan as Britney Spears".

In an interview with Aljazeera English television Masrour Barzani, the powerful head of the Kurdish intelligence service (Parastin), says pointedly that if the KRG is not consulted about an agreement between Baghdad and Ankara then it will not necessarily go along with it. In any case, he says the PKK bases are "in remote and isolated areas" outside his government's control.

NYT : Turkey Attacks Kurdish Rebel Positions

Turkey Attacks Kurdish Rebel Positions

By SEBNEM ARSU | October 29, 2007

ISTANBUL, Oct. 28 — Turkey’s military on Sunday attacked Kurdish rebels in the southeastern province of Tunceli, a mostly Kurdish area that is a base for the separatist Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K.

Special forces troops, supported by helicopter gunships, assaulted the rebel positions, according to the state-run Anatolian News Agency. The area was closed to traffic, causing disruptions along local roads, it said. Local news agencies said at least 15 rebels had been killed, though the military declined to confirm that number.

The mountainous area where the military operation took place is roughly 400 miles from the border with Iraq, where raids by Iraqi-based P.K.K. rebels have killed at least 42 people in the past month and led to increased tensions between Turkey, Iraq and the United States.

While Turkey has so far refrained from beginning a large-scale military incursion into Iraq, operations against the P.K.K. in its southeastern region have been taking place for several weeks, the government has said. On Friday, minor clashes occurred between the army and rebels in Bingol, a town in the southeast. The army said in a statement on Saturday that there were no casualties.

The military operations come before a visit to the United States by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Nov. 5. Many political analysts view his meeting with President Bush as crucial before Turkey decides whether to send forces into Iraq to dismantle the P.K.K. Washington is strongly opposed to any military action by Turkey in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, thousands of protesters throughout Turkey marched against Kurdish militancy on Sunday, calling for an end to a conflict that has taken more than 30,000 lives since the 1980s.

Government officials have been calling for calm, saying the P.K.K. did not represent the more than 15 million Kurds in the country.

“The 70 million people living in this country are brothers, citizens of this country,” Cemil Cicek, the government spokesman, said Sunday. “We have no separation among us; let’s not give in to provocations.”

NYT : In the Rugged North of Iraq, Kurdish Rebels Flout Turkey

In the Rugged North of Iraq, Kurdish Rebels Flout Turkey

By SABRINA TAVERNISE | October 29, 2007

RANIYA, Iraq, Oct. 27 — A low-slung concrete building off a steep mountain road marks the beginning of rebel territory in this remote corner of northern Iraq. The fighters based here, Kurdish militants fighting Turkey, fly their own flag, and despite urgent international calls to curb them, they operate freely, receiving supplies in beat-up pickup trucks less than 10 miles from a government checkpoint.

“Our condition is good,” said one fighter, putting a heaping spoonful of sugar into his steaming tea. “How about yours?” A giant face of the rebels’ leader — Abdullah Ocalan, now in a Turkish prison — has been painted on a nearby slope.

The rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., is at the center of a crisis between Turkey and Iraq that began when the group’s fighters killed 12 Turkish soldiers on Oct. 21, prompting Turkey, a NATO member, to threaten an invasion.

But the P.K.K. continues to operate casually here, in full view of Iraqi authorities. The P.K.K.’s impunity is rooted in the complex web of relationships and ambitions that began with the American-led invasion of Iraq more than four years ago, and has frustrated others with an interest in resolving the crisis — the Turks, Iraqis and the Bush administration.

The United States responded to the P.K.K. raid by putting intense pressure on Iraq’s Kurdish leaders who control the northern area where the rebels hide, with a senior State Department official delivering a rare rebuke last week over their “lack of action” in curbing the P.K.K.

But even with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scheduled to visit Istanbul this week, Kurdish political leaders seemed in no hurry to act.

An all-out battle is out of the question, they argue, because the rugged terrain makes it impossible to dislodge them.

“Closing the camps means war and fighting,” said Azad Jindyany, a senior Kurdish official in Sulaimaniya, a regional capital. “We don’t have the army to do that. We did it in the past, and we failed.”

But even logistical flows remain uninterrupted, despite the fact that Iraqi Kurdish leaders have some of the most precise and extensive intelligence networks in the country. As the war has worsened, the United States has come to depend increasingly on the Kurds as partners in running Iraq and as overseers of the one part of the country where some of their original aspirations are actually being met.

Iraqi Kurdish officials, for their part, appear to be politely ignoring American calls for action, saying the only serious solution is political, not military. They have taken their own path, allowing the guerrillas to exist on their territory, while at the same time quietly trying to persuade them to stop attacks.

“They have allowed the P.K.K. to be up there,” said Mark Parris, a former American ambassador to Turkey who is now at the Brookings Institution. “That couldn’t have happened without their permitting them to be there. That’s their turf. It’s as simple as that.”

The situation poses a puzzle to the United States, which badly wants to avert a new front in the war, but finds itself forced to choose between two trusted allies — Turkey, a NATO member whose territory is the transit area for most of its air cargo to Iraq, and the Kurds, their closest partners in Iraq.

The United States “is like a man with two wives,” said one Iraqi Kurd in Sulaimaniya. “They quarrel, but he doesn’t want to lose either of them.”

Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state, numbering more than 25 million, spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

Most live in Turkey, which has curtailed their rights, fearing secession. The P.K.K. wants an autonomous Kurdish area in eastern Turkey, and has repeatedly attacked the Turkish military, and sometimes the civilian population, since the 1980s, in a conflict that has left more than 30,000 dead.

In this small town a short drive from the edge of rebel territory, and in Sulaimaniya, 55 miles to the south, it is business as usual. A political party affiliated with the rebel group is open and holding meetings. Pickup trucks zip in and out of the group’s territory, and a government checkpoint a short drive away from the area acts as a friendly tour guide. Its soldiers said they had waved through eight cars of journalists on one day last week.

Mala Bakhtyar, a senior member in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that governs this northeastern region, said there had been no explicit orders from Baghdad to limit the P.K.K., and scoffed at last week’s statement by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, that Iraq would close the P.K.K.’s offices, saying they had already been shut long ago.

“They are guests, but they are making their living by themselves,” Mr. Bakhtyar said. “We don’t support them.”

He added: “We don’t agree with them. We don’t like to make a fight with Turkey.”

Fayeq Mohamed Goppy, a leader in the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, an offshoot of the P.K.K. that still operates freely, argues that Iraqi Kurdish leaders are only paying lip service to wanting the P.K.K. to leave. In reality, the politicians want the separatists around as protection against Sunni Arab extremists, who most Iraqi Kurds believe will move in if the P.K.K. leaves the mountains.

Noshirwan Mustafa, a prominent Kurdish leader, said the area was as impenetrable as the mountains in Pakistan where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are thought to be hiding. “For me, the P.K.K. is better than the Taliban,” he said.

Local Kurdish authorities have asked Mr. Goppy to keep a low profile, including canceling a planned conference in Erbil, he said, but otherwise have not limited his activities.

“They really don’t want P.K.K. to go,” he said in an interview in his home in Sulaimaniya. If the group is eliminated, the Iraqi Kurdish area “is a really small piece for eating, very easy to swallow.”

Mr. Parris argues that the Kurdish leader of northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, ever astute, is holding onto the P.K.K. as a future bargaining chip with Turkey, and will not use it until he absolutely has to.

“The single most important piece of negotiating capital may very well be his ability to take care of the P.K.K.,” he said.

Mr. Jindyany said local authorities would be happy to get rid of them if they could, calling the situation a sword of Damocles for Iraqi Kurds.

Throughout its history in northern Iraq, which dates back to the early 1980s, under an agreement with Mr. Barzani, the P.K.K. has had contentious relations with Iraqi Kurdish leaders. It fought in their civil wars, against Mr. Barzani in 1997, and three years later, against Jalal Talabani, a powerful Kurd who is now the president of Iraq.

But since the American invasion in 2003, the political landscape has changed. Iraqi Kurds, emboldened by their secure position, have stopped fighting each other and turned their attentions to other threats like Turkey, a state that has long oppressed its Kurdish population, and Islamic extremism from Baghdad.

This area of northern Iraq, which Iraqis call Kurdistan, in some ways eclipsed the P.K.K.’s struggle for an autonomous Kurdish area, Iraqi Kurds said.

“They were jealous of our autonomy,” said Goran Kader, a Communist Party leader in Sulaimaniya. “They wanted to do the same thing in Turkey.”

At the same time, the P.K.K. was reorganizing, after its leader, Mr. Ocalan, was captured in 1999, and a skilled group of military commanders took over day-to-day operations, said Aliza Marcus, the author of “Blood and Belief: The P.K.K. and the Kurdish Fight for Independence.”

The commanders were intent on military escalation, she said, and stepped up attacks, under Mr. Ocalan’s jailhouse orders, in part to remain relevant.

“They don’t want to be sidelined,” Ms. Marcus said. “That’s really what’s driven them since 2004,” when attacks resumed after a five-year cease-fire. “They want to say, ‘Turkish Kurds are important too — don’t think the Kurdish problem has been solved.’ ”

The ambush of Turkish soldiers on Oct. 21, which took place just a few miles from the Iraqi border, served the purpose perfectly.

Public sympathy in Raniya and Sulaimaniya is enormous, and the fighters procure supplies and health care here with ease. Fighters do not go to hospitals, for fear of standing out — the ones from Turkey speak a different Kurdish dialect — but are treated in doctors’ homes, said one former fighter, an Iraqi Kurd who was recruited at age 14.

“Their organization is everywhere,” said the fighter, who now works as a police officer for the main political party, after surrendering to local authorities in 2003. “Their members are everywhere.”

To Iraqi Kurds, Turkey’s approach is pure politics. There is no military solution to the problem of the P.K.K., they say, because the terrain would never permit victory, and Turkey’s leaders know that.

The solution, Mr. Mustafa argued, lies with moderates in Turkey, who must push for an amnesty for the rebels. Militant Kurds, for their part, should take advantage of the political opening in Turkey — 20 Kurdish deputies are now serving in Parliament there.

“When you have the door to the Parliament open, why are you going to the caves?” he said.

To that aim, talks were held with intermediaries for the P.K.K., Mr. Bakhtyar said. Since then, the rebels have not attacked, and officials and security analysts say that if the quiet holds until Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, meets with Ms. Rice on Friday and with President Bush three days later, he might not be pressured into military action.

“Soon there will be snow,” Mr. Kader said. “The roads will be blocked. That will be that until next year.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting from New York.