Kurds are threatening to invade Turkey if Turks come into Iraq.
Kurds will fight back if Turkey enters Iraq
From Anthony Loyd in northern Iraq
THE most powerful Kurdish militant group has threatened to resume its war with Turkey, should Ankara’s Armed Forces enter northern Iraq.
“We will undertake military actions throughout Turkey, in the countryside and cities, on military, economic and bureaucratic targets,” said Othman Ocalan, 47, a commander of Kadek, the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress, formerly known as the PKK.
A bear-like figure who said that he possessed nothing but the uniform in which he stood and a .38 Smith & Wesson seized from a dead Turkish commando officer, Mr Ocalan was speaking in his Qandil Mountain stronghold in Iraq.
The younger brother of the group’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and a leading member of its Central Committee, Othman Ocalan withheld support of a US invasion of Iraq and rejected the proposed postwar disarmament of Kadek while the Kurdish issue remained unsolved.
“Until the British and American policy on Kurdistan clears we won’t back them,” he said. “There will be no Kadek disarmament if the US demands it. In this instance we will resist them very strongly.”
With some 10,000 fighters deployed inside Turkey, Iran and northern Iraq, Kadek also wields great power among the Kurdish diaspora in Europe, where it can put thousands of Kurdish activists and demonstrators on the streets.
Mr Ocalan made clear that for him the future of the Kurds was paramount and the fate of Saddam Hussein almost incidental.
Although other Kurdish rebel armies claim larger gross numbers than Kadek, Mr Ocalan’s group is a full-time, professional army. Espousing a mix of Marxist-Leninist ideology with pan-Kurdish nationalism, members of the armed wing are lectured by political cadres on the outlook of figures such as Ché Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong for up to six hours a day. Sex and marriage are discouraged and fighters have neither pay nor possessions other than their uniform and weapons.
“I never hung out in bars with girls, even during my years in Europe,” said Akif, a 27-year-old fighter, who spent his teens in Wood Green and Westminster. “For me the cause was always more important than possessions, and after the bad treatment I received by officials in Britain I wanted to return to my Kurdish roots in this clean ideological environment and participate in the struggle.”
The indoctrination and hardiness of its fighters and leadership was vividly apparent in their snowy Qandil Mountain base. The terrain, accessible only by foot, mule or pack-pony, was a natural fortress of cloud, buttressed peaks and plunging ravines. Eight Kadek fighters died in a recent avalanche here — they are said to be commonplace.
Fighters armed with Ak47 and M16 rifles could be seen ascending valleys in patrol-sized groups on their way to bases at higher altitude, where they have been strengthening positions and distributing ammunition in anticipation of action. Word of the potential Turkish entry to northern Iraq appeared to have galvanised them with a new morale. The cult-like atmosphere, with its emphasis on self-sacrifice, was enhanced by a shrine to Kadek dead at the foot of the Qandil range. Dominated by the portrait of Abdullah Ocalan and the organisation’s red and yellow flag, photographs of assassinated leaders, slain fighters, suicide bombers and self-immolating protesters hung from whitewashed walls.
“For us martyrdom is the bridge between the people, the comrades, and the cause itself: the cement of unification,” explained Raperin, a 34-year-old Syrian Kurd fighter and one of the women who comprise a third of Kadek’s strike forces.
In 1997 the United States named the PKK as one of the world’s top 30 terrorist organisations. To date it has not struck American targets, but Othman Ocalan did not rule out a change in strategy. “We don’t want to oppose America and in this matter we will tread very carefully. But if they don’t change our label as terrorists then we will oppose them with all means,” he said.
“Kurds in the east, in the north, in Europe will back Kadek. Any force which does not find a solution for all parts of Kurdistan will gain our antipathy.”
Formed in 1978 to counter the repression of Kurds living in Turkey, in 1984 the PKK began a guerrilla campaign. Some 20,000 people died as the group’s militant wing attacked Turkish security forces, judicial figures, teachers, landowners and local authorities. The Turkish Army responded with equal brutality, using tactics not unlike those of Iraq against Kurdish guerrillas. Up to
3,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed or emptied by the authorities during the creation of a security zone in southern Turkey, while two million Kurds were displaced northwards.
After Abdullah Ocalan’s arrest in 1999, the PKK changed its tactics. Renaming itself Kadek in 2002, its leadership contended that the armed struggle was on hold pending the “democratisation” of Turkey, a decision that it declared to be reversed last month. |
