Inside the PKK

Battle-hardened Marxist guerrillas are promising to derail America's plans for northern Iraq, reports Julius Strauss in the Qandil mountains

10 March 2003

THEY recognise no God, seek no payment and kill with revolutionary fervour. When they die their bodies are buried in mountain meadows far from their grieving families.

Their pin-ups are Che Guevera, Ho Chi Minh and Lenin, their heroes women who have set fire to themselves to publicise the cause and young men who have been tortured to death in Turkish prisons. Welcome to the ranks of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party.

The guerrillas, ideologically-committed and battle-hardened, are readying themselves for battle with Turkey, and, if necessary, the Western allies to defend their dream of a Kurdish homeland.

For 14 years the PKK has survived a war with the Turkish state that has claimed 20,000 lives, left 4,000 Kurdish villages destroyed and displaced more than two million Kurds from their homes.

In 1999 they suffered an almost fatal setback when Abdullah Ocalan, their founder, leader and spiritual guide, was captured.

But high in the rugged Qandil mountains of northern Iraq in places accessible only by foot or horse, the comrades are back on the warpath.

The PKK leaders are furious with the allied war plan to allow Turkish troops to fan out in northern Iraq and the insistence that Kurds drop demands for regional Kurdish autonomy in a post-Saddam Iraq.

Last week - the first time Western journalists have been allowed into the PKK's mountain strongholds in more than a year - I and a colleague visited them.

Reaching the PKK's remote camps involved a perilous journey. From the small town of Raniyah in northern Iraq, we were taken on a terrifying hour-long drive across no man's land.

The road was narrow and slippery and barely clung to the mountainside. Each side of the rutted mountain track was mined.

Officials had warned us to take bodyguards to protect against highway robbers, but none was willing to come. First one of our cars broke down, then the other. For the last stretch, we shouldered our packs and walked.

The guerrillas were polite, but unsmiling. In these parts Britain is remembered for reneging on a promise to grant the Kurds their own homeland after the First World War.

Osman Ocalan, the fugitive younger brother of Abdullah and a leading member of the 11 man PKK central committee was our host. He told us: "If the Turks come it means they are here to destroy the freedom of the Kurds. We will launch a new guerrilla war.

"We will take military actions throughout Turkey, in the countryside and in the cities. We will attack Turkey's economy, its military and its bureaucracy."

Western planners would be unwise to take the PKK threat lightly. In two decades the Turkish army has failed to destroy the group, which at 10,000 men is smaller but far tougher than the leading Iraqi Kurdish militias, the PUK and KDP.

It already has a proven terrorist record - in the early 1990s the group targeted Turkish army bases and tourist destinations and kidnapped Western tourists.

Both America and the European Union still list it as a terrorist organisation, despite a name change a year ago to the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress.

Mr Ocalan added: "We don't want to oppose America and we will tread very carefully. But if they don't change our label as terrorists we will oppose them with all our means. We will never allow ourselves to be disarmed as long as the Kurdish issue is not settled." The PKK's core is heavily indoctrinated with Marxist theory and units are overseen by a Soviet-style political officer.

Akif, a Kurd who was brought up in Britain and Germany but returned to the mountains to fight for the cause, said: "In Europe I would always be looked down on. Here I am free and ready to die for what I believe in."

Cuma Ali, 27, half-Macedonian and half-Turkish, joined the PKK because of its Socialist ideals. He said: "The central committee is our will. Whatever it says is necessary for the millions of Kurds in Kurdistan we will do, even if that means fighting America."