THE PKK FACTOR:
ANOTHER CRITICAL ENEMY FRONT IN THE WAR ON TERROR
By Michael Rubin
It was mid-October, 2003. We descended into a valley 20 kilometers northwest of Hajji Umran, the northernmost official border crossing between Iran and Iraq. Snow remained on the mountains to our north and east, although melting streams descended from the diminishing snow packs. In the distance, on the ridge marking the border, were lookout posts belonging to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Some rusted and twisted mortar shells remained on grassy fields, which narrowed and terraced as they approached the Iranian border. Farmhouses were scattered on the narrow plain. Pickup trucks stacked high with tomatoes sat beside fields or meandered slowly down the dirt road.
As we came around a curve at the foot of the valley, three young men ran out of one farmhouse, pointing Kalashnikovs at our convoy of five Toyota SUVs. They were fighters with the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, better known by their acronym, the PKK.
We stopped. Ten armed guards got out of our vehicles. Two walked down to meet the PKK fighters. A few minutes later they returned. "It's no problem. They wanted to know where we were going," one of my guards said. "They don't bother people more heavily armed than they are."
The PKK's terror in northern Iraq stretches more than a decade. In 1994, PKK terrorists rained mortars down on the rooftops of the mountaintop settlement of Amadya. Touring the ancient town in March, 2001, residents showed me the damage to their homes.
PKK members also sabotaged bridges, cutting off villagers from their fields and disrupting the local economy. No matter how poor were Masud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan at their nadir, neither cultivated nor smuggled drugs. The same is not true of the PKK, which facilitates drug smuggling from Iran through Iraq and Turkey and into Europe.
In November, 2000, fighting erupted on Qandil mountain between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] and PKK after the PKK sought to take over the nearby town of Rania. More than 400 died in subsequent battles. Fighting was so severe that PUK television every evening broadcast the names of its murdered peshmurga. Municipal governments in towns like Darbandikan and Kuysanjaq erected structures to better accommodate mourners.
The PKK's most bloody legacy is in Turkey. In the mid-1980s, the PKK initiated a violent campaign responsible for over 30,000 deaths in Turkey. The PKK raided villages and executed civilians. More Kurdish civilians died at the hands of the PKK than at the hands of the Turkish army. On July 18, 2004, I ducked into a teahouse in Konya, a large town in south-central Turkey. With no empty tables, I joined a middle-aged man reading a newspaper. Originally from Bursa, he had trained as a schoolteacher. Upon graduation, the Turkish government sought to assign him to Mardin, a largely Kurdish town in southeastern Turkey. But, the PKK had begun executing schoolteachers (whom they called state collaborators), and so he, as did his classmates, refused to take their positions. The Turkish economy and education system suffered; southeastern Turkey continues to lag behind the rest of the country. Many Turks blame the PKK insurgency for the hyperinflation which plagued Turkey until three years ago (one U.S. dollar is equivalent to over 1.4 million Turkish lira today. Real-estate firms advertise homes costing trillions of liras).
I spent August, 2000, in Diyarbakir, the largest town in southeastern Turkey, waiting for permission to cross into northern Iraq. Diyarbakir was emerging from years of terrorism and insurgency. Hotels were empty and streets deserted at night. Taking a public bus to Van, seven hours away near the Iranian border, police stopped us more than a dozen times to check identity cards and bags, and to make sure there were no PKK among us.
The Bush administration's failure to address the PKK presence in Iraq created a dangerous precedent. It legitimized, for example, the Lebanese government's decision to allow Hezbollah to conduct terrorist operations with impunity, despite Lebanon's responsibilities under terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 425.
U.S. toleration of the PKK threatens to emerge as a hot issue in coming weeks. Since the PKK ended its ceasefire on June 1, southeastern Turkey has suffered a renewed wave of roadside bombs and assassinations. On July 27, PKK fighters killed a Turkish policeman and a soldier in the southeastern province of Bingol. On August 2, Turkish soldiers and PKK fighters clashed in southeastern Turkey. Those incidents that Turkish newspapers report may be the tip of the iceberg. In Konya and Kayseri, Turkish students spoke of a recent PKK execution of three Turkish conscripts along the Iranian border.
Turks contrast Washington's foot-dragging with positive noises coming from Iran, long a sponsor and facilitator of PKK terrorism. On July 28, following a meeting with Iranian Vice President Muhammad Reza Arif, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Iran would declare the PKK a terrorist organization and shut them down. The Iranian pledge may be insincere — previous Iranian promises to crack down on the PKK and al-Qa'ida were empty — but the perception of the Turkish public matters, especially as terrorism-related casualties rise.
Instead, as with much in the global war on terrorism, the problem is in implementation. President Bush may enunciate a no-nonsense approach to policy, but the National Security Council neither coordinates effectively nor enforces policy discipline. Some NSC staff members have gone so far as to question the war on terror. Bush recently promoted a career diplomat who spoke of "Bush's stupidity" among not only American, but also foreign colleagues. A recent NSC appointee has argued that the U.S.A. should take a more forgiving attitude toward terrorism, whereby "lesser penalties would apply to lesser levels of state sponsorship." Such nuance flies in the face of Bush strategy, since it implies some terror to be permissible.
There remains, however, a major problem with clientitis, both at the lower levels of the State Department and at the upper levels of the military. The State Department dominated the Coalition Provisional Authority's governance wing. Many U.S. diplomats serving in Baghdad spent their careers in the Arab world. Reading translated Arabic newspapers and drinking tea with government elites in Beirut, Damascus, and Riyadh takes its toll: Many had adopted the biases of the societies in which they served.
Among these biases was a cynical distrust and dislike of Turkey. One U.S. diplomat with recent service in the region scoffed at the idea that northern Iraq's safe haven originated with Turkish President Turgat Ozal. Talking points drawn up by U.S. diplomats often failed to remind Kurdish politicians that it was Turkey's contribution of Incirlik airbase which made possible for more than a decade the no-fly zone and, by extension, the existence of the Kurdistan regional government. Few U.S. diplomats reminded the Kurdistan Democratic Party about significant Turkish subsidies that went to the peshmurga during the 1990s. American diplomats coming from the Arab world neither were aware nor appreciated Turkey's democracy. One foreign-service officer described Syrian-occupied Lebanon as more democratic than Turkey.
The personal relationship between CENTCOM officers and the Turkish general staff has gone from bad to worse. On July 4, 2003, U.S. forces in Sulaymaniyah detained a Turkish commando force operating illegally in Iraq. Turkish authorities leaked the incident to the press. U.S. officials say that the Turkish commandoes had in their possession documents indicating that they sought to assassinate a Kirkuk political figure; Turkish authorities deny this. One CENTCOM official told me they had warned Ankara after previous incidents. During March, 2003, negotiations in Ankara, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad made clear that the U.S.A. would not tolerate Turkish incursions not coordinated with CENTCOM. While some elements of the Turkish military appear at fault, the failure of CENTCOM liaison officers to establish the close working relations with Turkish general staff that EUCOM personnel enjoyed exacerbated the situation.
Regardless of the fault or blame, the July 4 incident has had a deeper lasting impact in Turkey than did the dispute over passage of U.S. troops. Many U.S. officials serving in Baghdad trace Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer's hardening attitude — if not antipathy — toward Turkey to the Sulaymaniyah incident.
According to both Turkish and U.S. sources, CENTCOM has promised to share with Turkey plans which address the PKK, but consistently fails to deliver. There may be legitimate reasons for planning delays, but CENTCOM leaves the impression that it is filibustering. "I can understand their concerns," said a Turkish general, acknowledging that rooting PKK out of inhospitable terrain is difficult, "But I can't understand why they won't be honest with us."
CENTCOM also suffers a credibility gap at home. Even as I was stopped by PKK fighters, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Staff continued to claim ignorance of the PKK's exact location. This was dishonest or disingenuous. As we continued on from the de facto PKK checkpoint, we could see from the roadside a well-tended PKK graveyard and also a permanent PKK compound under camouflage, mesh netting. Twice rounding bends beneath high bluffs, we saw automatic weapon-toting PKK fighters over looking the road.
The Joint Staff's claims are more troubling given rumors that, last Autumn, apparently without interagency authorization, some members of the 101st Airborne met with PKK representatives in Mosul, thereby legitimizing the terrorist group in direct contravention to the policy of the Commander-in-Chief.
Ironically, proactive deployment might obviate the need for a confrontation. Despite the proximity to the unguarded Iranian frontier, many of the areas occupied by the PKK have no U.S. military, Iraqi military, or peshmurga presence. Villagers, Kurdish officials, and peshmurga all say that small garrisons of Coalition forces in valleys and along the Iranian frontier would fill a vacuum, and force the PKK back across the border into Iran which, continues to provide aid and comfort to the group.
One thing should be clear, though. Terrorists exploit a vacuum. Nearly 3,000 Americans would be alive today had the Clinton administration not left unaddressed a vacuum in Afghanistan. Our impotence toward the PKK threatens to undermine our credibility not only in Turkey, but also in our fight against terrorists and states like Lebanon which provide them safe haven. With regard to the PKK, the stakes are higher. Not only is the U.S. President's credibility on the line, but so too is a 50-year partnership with one of our most valuable allies.
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
Page Two
Page One
The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
The foregoing article by Rubin was originally published in National Review Online, August 5, 2004, and can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.
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