[Daughters_of_Ataturk] A Kurdish Society of Soldiers, Washington Post, March 8, 2008

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A Kurdish Society of Soldiers
In Rugged N. Iraq, Guerrillas Forge a Unity Based on
Hardship and Defiance

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 8, 2008; A01

ZAP VALLEY, Iraq -- On the day the Turkish soldiers
withdrew from Iraq, 40 Kurdish guerrillas convened to
bury five of their dead.

The corpses were wrapped in black plastic and
camouflage tarp, lashed to stretchers fashioned from
branches, and draped in the flag of the Kurdistan
Workers' Party, or PKK. In silence the guerrillas
stacked large rocks into five piles, resting the
stretchers end-to-end on the cairns. They stood in two
rows with machine guns pointed above the mountains
that surrounded them and waited for their leader to
speak.

"The Turkish army could not capture any of our
territory, could not get one of our bases, our weapons
or even a scrap of nylon," Bahoz Erdal, the
39-year-old military commander of the Kurdish
guerrillas, told his serried ranks. "The Turkish army
didn't have any chance to rest. When they attacked, we
hit them. When they made camp, we hit them. Even when
they pulled back, we hit them."

The conclusion of the eight-day battle last Friday
along Iraq's northern border was described by Turkey's
government as the scheduled end to a successful
incursion that crippled its enemies, destroying
hundreds of their caves and hideouts. But ultimately
the battle ended where it had begun, with the
intractable guerrillas in sole control of hundreds of
miles of mountainous terrain.

At the funeral, the quiet ending to their latest war,
some guerrillas bowed their heads but no tears were
shed.

"In the last 10 days in Zap, our fighters displayed
their historic heroism," Erdal told his soldiers. "In
this defense, you brought back again the fighting
spirit of the PKK."

A Washington Post correspondent and staff photographer
who spent five days inside rebel territory during and
after the battle -- the only reporters allowed to
accompany the guerrillas through this period --
observed a self-sufficient society, with its own
rituals and traditions, that bears no resemblance to
the rest of Iraq. Access, however, was limited to the
people and places the guerrillas chose to reveal, and
it was difficult to verify details of the battle
because of the vast distances between locations.

What was clear was that years in these snowcapped
mountains have forged the fighters into rugged
ascetics. Although they have based themselves in
northern Iraq, they are oriented elsewhere, choosing
even to live on Turkish time, an hour behind Iraq's.
They are based in the heart of the Islamic Middle East
but are largely uninterested in religion or the
cultures they abandoned in Turkey, Syria, Iran and
Iraq. They relate their struggle to those of the
American revolutionaries who fought the British crown,
and the Cuban guerrillas who followed Fidel Castro
down from the Sierra Maestra mountains.

"We are fighting for democracy, for freedom," said
Osman Delbrine, a 32-year-old guerrilla with eight
years in the mountains. "We are fighting for peace and
for all Kurds in all nations."

Their tactics can be ruthless. They slip over the
border to blow up Turkish soldiers and retreat back to
Iraq. It is more unusual for them to be on the
defensive, protecting their territory from Turkish
attack. The PKK, with 4,000 to 5,000 fighters,
according to the U.S. State Department, represents
less of a threat than it once did to the Turkish
government. But the group is benefiting from a
resurgence of nationalist feeling among the 25 million
Kurds dispersed throughout the region.

The PKK leaders say they are no longer fighting for an
independent Kurdish state, or even to replicate or
expand the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq.
Rather, they say, they want their people to speak
Kurdish in schools, to receive national identification
cards, to have equal rights for women, to avoid
persecution by state security forces, and to gain
respect and political influence wherever they live. To
walk among the guerrillas, however, is to feel some
are also fighting to prolong their communal, socialist
experiment and to be left alone.

"In society, in the cities, I feel like someone is
choking me," said Berivan, a 27-year-old female
guerrilla. "In the mountains I feel free."

The guerrillas receive no salaries. They sew their
olive-drab wool uniforms and treat their wounded. They
have no homes and live in peripatetic motion, walking
goat trails and dry creek beds, through mossy boulder
fields and across slabs of brindled rock. The small
villages that dot this territory are abandoned now,
the lone paved road deserted. The guerrillas sleep on
bedrolls in caves or under the stars, drink spring
water and eat what they can forage or smuggle in from
civilization.

"Our life is totally different than yours," one
guerrilla said.

Although the PKK welcomes visitors, the Kurdistan
Regional Government of northern Iraq has tried to bar
outsiders, particularly journalists, from entering the
area where the authorities effectively tolerate the
guerrillas. After receiving an invitation to tour the
area, The Post's journalists hiked for eight hours,
first up a rocky path for herders to the top of a
mountain overlooking Kurdish towns to the south, then
down a precipitous slope a local guide said was
littered with land mines. Along the way, it was
necessary to shimmy across a steel bridge mangled by
Turkish bombs and crouch below boulders when warplanes
flew overhead. The mountains rang with the spatter of
gunfire and the discharge of distant bombs. At dusk,
the first guerrilla -- wearing camouflage and carrying
a Kalashnikov rifle -- appeared from behind a tree in
a rock-strewn ravine. Others soon emerged, and one of
them held out his hand.

"Welcome to our mountain," he said in English.
'He Was My Best Friend'

The Turkish military invasion, known as Operation Sun,
began Feb. 21 with an aerial bombardment, followed by
a push of a reported 2,000 ground troops in various
passes across the 200-mile border Turkey shares with
Iraq.

The thrust of the ground battle targeted the Zap
Valley, a crucial region in the western portion of the
guerrillas' territory, home to their headquarters,
training camps, underground storage rooms, burial
plots and fighters manning their Russian-made
antiaircraft Dushka machine-gun positions on the snowy
peaks. Erdal, the high-strung, fast-talking guerrilla
commander, abandoned his medical school studies in
Damascus, Syria, two decades ago to join the PKK.
Since then, he has fixated on fighting Turkey.

"It's not random that they are attacking this area,"
he said. "The army that they brought is enough to
capture an area like Zap. But when you use a very big
army, it's difficult to organize, and your movements
will be slow."

In the end, Erdal said, his guerrillas drove Turkey
back down from the mountains after killing more than
120 of its soldiers; Turkey claimed to have lost 24.
The disparity was larger on the guerrilla side: Erdal
and several others insisted that just 10 of their own
were killed, while Turkey put the number at more than
230.

One of the corpses lashed to the branches on the day
of the funeral belonged to Ayhan Eruh. During
preparations for the funeral, the names of the dead
were written on scraps of white paper tied to their
chests. This was a scene Roshat Sarhat, a 30-year-old
guerrilla who once was a journalist in Istanbul, had
no interest in seeing. He stayed in an abandoned stone
hut on a hillside far from the service. The bare
single room was silent but for the crackle of his
radio and the buzz of a surveillance drone high
overhead.

"He was my best friend," Sarhat said. Eruh had died on
the first day of the battle.
'The Mountain Teaches Us'

Throughout the fighting, the hundreds of guerrillas
used the same battle-tested tactics they have relied
on for years: Move quickly, hit and retreat, harass
and confuse the more-powerful enemy. They carry
AK-47s, sniper rifles, shoulder-fired rockets and hand
grenades.

"Some of our attacks required only five guerrillas,
and others used 50 or 60," Erdal said. "For example,
you send five guerrillas to a huge army at night, they
attack them and leave the area; then these soldiers
cannot sleep until the morning. In a different
situation, you use 50 or 60 guerrillas to hold a
mountain."

After President Bush met with Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in November to discuss the PKK
problem, the guerrillas rushed to make arrangements
for battle. They stashed ammunition, weapons, food and
water in caves and crags throughout the mountains, for
quick resupply. Inside one such cave, they installed a
cylindrical, metal wood-burning stove and chimney to
heat a room constructed of army green cloth and
plastic tarp.

"The mountain is a school for us," said Elif, a
32-year-old commander who dropped out of interior
design school in Turkey 10 years ago to join the PKK.
"The mountain teaches us how to walk, it taught us how
to live in cold weather, how to go without eating for
a long time," she said. "The Turkish soldiers have
huge bodies, but they can't stay in the snow for more
than a couple hours."

In the mountains they communicate using cellphone text
messages or speak in code over hand-held Yaesu radios
on ever-changing frequencies. If they occupy an
abandoned home, they blanket the windows to hide the
light and build fires at night to hide the smoke. "We
are not scared," Sarhat said. "But we are always
careful."

Sarhat, a somber, serious man, joined the PKK a decade
ago after working as a television reporter in Turkey.
He was born to Kurdish parents in the city of Van but
did not learn his ancestral language because teaching
it in the schools was forbidden. As he grew older and
studied Kurdish history, he felt increasingly angry
that his culture was suppressed.

"Anywhere the Kurds live in Turkey, you can't act like
a Kurd. You can't have your own identification, you
can't have your own history or culture," he said. "I
realized that they took my nation's rights, our
education, our identity. Then I decided to join the
PKK."

In wartime the guerrillas fill various roles. There
are medics with UNICEF first-aid kits, cooks and
videographers, frontline fighters and logisticians.
Yet they are also uniform down to the smallest
details. They smoke one brand of cigarettes, Business
Royales, and nearly all wear peach-colored Turkish
Mekap sneakers with orange laces.

The guerrillas are not a people's army or ad hoc
insurgency, but a trained paramilitary force that
requires every new recruit to attend a three-month
camp to study military tactics and become
indoctrinated in the ideology of the imprisoned
leader, Abdullah Ocalan. The PKK's separatist war
against Turkish authorities, which began in 1984 and
lasted for a decade and a half, claimed the lives of
about 35,000 people, mostly Kurds in southeastern
Turkey.

In the PKK enclave in northern Iraq, Ocalan's chubby,
mustachioed face is emblazoned on hillsides, flags and
small pins the fighters wear on their vests. The
reverence they exhibit toward Ocalan, captured in 1999
in Nairobi and now in a Turkish prison, borders on
cultish. After assassination attempts against Ocalan
in the 1990s, guerrillas immolated themselves and some
became suicide bombers. To the governments of Turkey,
Iraq and the United States, those tactics solidified
the PKK's reputation as a terrorist organization.

"We don't want any mother in the world to have to
receive the body of her dead son," said Hadar Afreen,
a 26-year-old guerrilla who grew up outside Aleppo,
Syria. "We don't want to fight; we want to be
peaceful. But if they attack us, we will defend
ourselves."

The PKK recruits many of its fighters when they are
teenagers or college students and has been criticized
for exploiting young people and effectively trapping
them in the guerrilla force. But more than a dozen
people interviewed last week said they came to the
fight willingly. Some said they joined because their
villages had been attacked or relatives slain by
Turkish soldiers.

Afreen came to the mountains as an 18-year-old after
she was told by Arab teachers she must join Syria's
ruling Baath Party while in high school or face
expulsion. She was familiar with the books of Ocalan
and considered him a hero. She left a note for her
parents saying she was joining the PKK, sneaked out of
the house and has not spoken to them since.

"What I'm doing here is more important than my
parents," she said.

After Erdal's speech at the funeral, the guerrillas,
in solemn procession, marched the corpses up the
mountainside, through wild grass meadows and over
footbridges spanning two rushing creeks, until they
reached their stone-walled cemetery surrounded by
craters from Turkish bombs. With shovels and picks,
they dug five spaces in the rows of cinder-block
graves. They pushed the scraps of paper bearing names
inside clear plastic bottles and placed them in the
graves. Then they covered their dead with dirt and
blank stone slabs and dispersed without ceremony back
into the mountains.

Staff photographer Andrea Bruce and special
correspondent Dlovan Brwari contributed to this
report. 

Sema Karaoglu, Founder               Meltem Birkegren, Director
www.DofA.org

www.wearetheturks.org
Daughters of Atatürk is proud to promote Turkish Heritage across the globe. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk shaped the legacy we proudly inherited.
His integrity and dynamism and vision constantly inspires us. We are thankful to him for walking the untrodden path, achieving the unimaginable dream, living the eternal vision. We are the Turks, we are the future of Turkey.

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Sema Karaoglu, Founder               Meltem Birkegren, Director
www.DofA.org
www.wearetheturks.org

Daughters of Atatürk is proud to promote Turkish Heritage across the globe. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk shaped the legacy we proudly inherited.
His integrity and dynamism and vision constantly inspires us. We are thankful to him for walking the untrodden path, achieving the unimaginable dream, living the eternal vision. We are the Turks, we are the future of Turkey.

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