A renewed threat

Resurgent Kurd group in Iraq has U.S., Turkey officials concerned

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER | Newsday Staff Correspondent

June 25, 2006

CAMP SININI, Iraq - The platoon of Kurdish fighters stood at attention in three lines, staring straight ahead in the direction of their homeland and their target: Turkey.

The country that is jumping through hoops to get into the European Union was only a few miles from this rebel training camp, across mountain peaks where the snow was melting with the arrival of spring.

At the end of the first line was a girl, a recent recruit like many in the platoon. She shrugged, blushed and giggled when asked how old she was.

"Fifteen," she said, giving her name as Zilan. A hand grenade hung from her belt, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle at her side.

Weren't her parents worried about her? "They are glad I am here," she said, her brow furrowing in irritation at not being treated as an adult. "They are proud."

A government's nightmare

This is the newly invigorated, growing Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the Turkish government's worst nightmare as the country tries to convince the EU that it is a peaceful, increasingly democratic country worthy of becoming the first Muslim nation in the European Union. The PKK also is a growing priority for U.S. political and military officials who have paid it little attention while they have been absorbed in the war against Iraq's insurgents.

Listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the EU, the Kurdish guerrilla group has been waging an increasingly brutal war in recent months against the Turkish military, reigniting an ethnic conflict at Europe's gateway to Iran and Iraq. With a nuclear crisis developing in Iran, and a costly 3-year-old war showing no signs of abatement in Iraq, the PKK's renewed conflict could further destabilize the region just when the United States can least afford another front opening up in Iraq.

After the establishment of the new Iraqi government, U.S. officials have indicated they may turn their attention to the PKK, which has been allowed to operate freely in northern Iraq for years.

"This is one of our top priorities," the State Department's Iraq coordinator, James Jeffrey, said in Washington late last month. U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad "is very aware of the PKK issue. He had consultations with the Iraqi government and with Kurdish leaders when he last was in the north. And we'll get to that as soon as we can."

There are signs that the PKK's war is spreading in unpredictable directions. Recently the conflict drew in Iran, which the PKK claims has been attacking its bases in northern Iraq - perhaps on behalf of Turkey. The PKK has threatened to retaliate inside Iran.

Violence spreading

It is in Turkey, the United States' key ally in the region, that the conflict has spread most quickly. With the shoot-outs in the hills of the Kurdish southeast have come bombings and firebombings in Istanbul, a suicide attack in the east, major riots, and echoes of the "dirty war" that the Turkish state promulgated in the 1990s against Kurds in the southeast.

Just as Turkish ministers want to talk up their country's improved human rights record, strong economy and bright future, their news channels and the Turkish people have become obsessed with a war they thought was over - a war that cost 35,000 lives in the 1980s and '90s. In its new incarnation, people on both sides die or are injured every week. On May 4, a bomb exploded in the mostly Kurdish city of Hakkari in southeastern Turkey as a military vehicle protecting a school bus in a convoy went past. Twenty-one people, including 11 children, were injured.

"Yes, it will go worse - for the terrorists," Yasar Yakis, a former foreign minister and now head of the Turkish parliament's EU harmonization committee, said in an interview in Ankara. "I don't see that a country of 73 million inhabitants and an army of 800,000 will surrender to a handful of terrorists."

Murad Karialan, PKK co-president, insisted in an interview that the PKK was merely defending itself against the Turkish army. "It's not part of the PKK's strategy to continue armed struggle," he said, speaking at a PKK base in northern Iraq where the U.S. military so far has left them alone. "The Kurdish people have the right to defend themselves against Turkish army attacks."

The PKK called off its four-year unilateral cease-fire in August 2004, but it was not until about six months ago that the conflict began to escalate to a point of crisis.

On Nov. 9, a man came to the door of a small bookstore in the distant, southeastern town of Semdinli, which sits in a steep valley only miles from the point where Turkey meets Iran and Iraq. He threw two hand grenades into the store, which was owned by a man who spent 15 years in Turkish prisons for his pro-Kurdish activities, and ran.

One man was killed, but the store owner, Seferi Yilmaz, 44, was not injured and he rushed out in pursuit of the attacker. In the slushy streets of Semdinli, the local Kurdish people captured the attacker and apprehended two other men waiting for him in a car nearby.

Two of them, including the attacker, turned out to be Turkish paramilitary intelligence officers. The third was a former PKK member-turned-informer for the Turkish security services. In the trunk of the car the crowd, who handed the men over to the police, found more weapons, maps and lists of people perhaps still to be targeted.