Turkey: Young Kurds Flock To Iraq And Syria To Fight

[Anthea]

Reuters

'Terrorists' help U.S. in battle against Islamic State in Iraq
By Isabel Coles

Washington has acquired an unlikely ally in its battle against Islamic State militants in Iraq - a group of fighters it formally classifies as terrorists.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), condemned for its three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state, says it played a decisive role in blunting the militants' sweep through Iraq, which triggered U.S. air strikes to halt their advance.

"This war will continue until we finish off the Islamic State," said Rojhat, a PKK fighter speaking from a hospital bed in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in Iraq.

The involvement of the PKK has consequences not only for rival Kurdish factions who failed to stop the Islamic State's advance, but also for Turkey and the international community, which is being lobbied by the PKK to drop the terrorist tag.

Rojhat, 33, was wounded for a third time in the battle to retake the northern Iraqi town of Makhmur from the Islamic State after the militants - deemed too extreme even for al Qaeda - routed the region's vaunted Kurdish peshmerga forces.

The first two times he was fighting Turkish forces, part of a conflict which killed 40,000 people between its beginnings in 1984 with demands for Kurdish independence from Turkey and a ceasefire in March 2013.

His role highlights the challenge the PKK represents for Ankara, which still views it as terrorist but feels seriously threatened by the Islamic State, which has seized dozens of its citizens and decapitated an American hostage this week.

Thanks to Rojhat and his comrades-in-arms, residents of Makhmur who fled in terror at an onslaught that threatened Arbil, 60 km (40 miles) away, are now returning to assess the damage.

They have already sprayed over graffiti that reads: "the Islamic State is here to stay".

"This is not just about Makhmur: this is about Kurdistan," said PKK commander Sadiq Goyi, seated beneath a banner of the group's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, referring to Kurdish-inhabited land in Syria and Iran as well as Turkey and Iraq.

"Islamic State is a danger to everyone, so we must fight them everywhere".

An armed sister group of the PKK - People's Defense Units (YPG) - has carved out an autonomous zone in Syria's northeast, successfully fending off attacks by IS militants who have proclaimed a caliphate straddling the frontier with Iraq.

When the militants overran peshmerga positions in northwestern Iraq, YPG fighters crossed over from Syria and evacuated thousands of minority Yazidis left stranded on a mountain with scant food and water.

"The PKK is our hero," said 26-year-old Hussein, one of hundreds of Yazidis being trained by YPG fighters at several camps inside Syria to fight the Islamic State.

PKK commanders say guerrillas have been dispatched to the front line in the cities of Kirkuk and Jalawla as well. They declined to give numbers and fierce fighting makes their statements hard to verify.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

Turkish security forces began clearing villages suspected of sympathizing with the PKK during the 1990s, displacing thousands of Kurds, some of whom fled to Iraq and eventually settled in a camp in Makhmur, recently turned into a base for PKK guerrillas.

The word "Apo", nickname for Ocalan, is scrawled on walls around the camp, which held more than 10,000 residents until the Islamic State's incursion.

A lone pair of socks still dangles from a washing line and unpicked grapes have begun to shrivel on the vine. The thud of artillery can be heard from the new front line with the Islamic state, several kilometers away.

The militants' surge towards Kurdistan destroyed the aura of invincibility surrounding the region's peshmerga forces, which had not fought for years and ultimately proved no match for fighters armed with weapons plundered from the Iraqi army.

PKK commanders however say the militants' main weapon is fear: "They are waging psychological warfare," Goyi said. "Islamic State are not as powerful as they're thought to be".

The PKK's newfound role may prove most worrying to its historic competitor, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). The two have long vied for leadership of the Kurdish community across the borders of Syria, Iran, Turkey and Iraq.

With Kurdish forces from all four countries fighting the same enemy for the first time, for now at least, PKK guerillas and peshmerga stand side by side at checkpoints on the road to Makhmur. Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan and also head of the KDP visited the camp himself to thank PKK commanders for their assistance.

But tensions are not far beneath the surface.

A senior KDP official said the PKK's involvement would discourage the international community from providing the Kurds with advanced weapons to match Islamic State's arsenal. "We don't need them," he said of the PKK, accusing it of seeking to discredit the KDP.

The wounded guerrilla Rojhat said the PKK was more organized and disciplined than the peshmerga, and its tactics better suited to fighting Islamic State, even without the kind of military hardware Iraqi Kurds are seeking.

"This is how we fought the Turkish army for years," Rojhat said. "War is an act of faith".

"NO NEED TO PANIC"

Ankara has made little comment on the latest conflict in Iraq, smarting from allegations, which it firmly denies, that its support for Sunni opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad helped the Islamic State to grow and fearing for the fate of dozens of its citizens the militants have captured.

But Turkish officials played down concern the PKK would be embolded by its role in Iraq into stirring unrest in Turkey, seeing the fight against Islamic State as a separate issue from their struggle with Ankara for Kurdish rights.

"In Iraq there is a crisis and the PKK has engaged in this fight along with other elements there," a senior Turkish government official told Reuters, adding that he did not see its engagement there as permanent.

"There is no fear of a division in Turkey or a fear of unification of the Kurdish population outside of Turkey. Since there are no demands through armed conflict or violence from the PKK in Turkey, there is no need to panic," the official said, asking for anonymity to allow him to speak more freely.

Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said this week the government may hold direct talks with the guerrillas, whose leader Ocalan is jailed on an island in the Marmara Sea. It proposes a plan involving the disarmament and reintegration of fighters into Turkish society.

The PKK see the new enemy and the old as very much linked, accusing Turkey of funding and sending Islamists to fight Kurds on their behalf in Syria, allegations Ankara denies.

But it has dropped its demand for a separate state for Kurds in Turkey's southeast in favor of devolution of power in each of the four countries across which Kurds are divided.

A European diplomat in Ankara said that the PKK would see its actions in Iraq, in particular its help in protecting members of the Yazidi community, as helping a diplomatic push to persuade the European Union to remove it from its list of terrorist groups.

"It is quite paradoxical that an organization proscribed as a terrorist group by the EU appears to have played such a significant role (against Islamic State)," the diplomat said.

"They’re challenging the legal basis on which the EU proscribed them in the first place. They will see all of what has been happening in the past few days as grist to that mill."

The European Union, however, would be highly unlikely to make any such move without Turkish agreement, he said.

"The Turks would be strongly against ... We’re not at the stage where Turkey would be willing to contemplate anything like that, absolutely not."

(This story has been refiled to correct spelling of proscribed in fourth paragraph from the end)

(Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Mark Hosenball in Washington, Orhan Coskun and Nick Tattersall in Istanbul; Editing by Michael Georgy and Philippa Fletcher)

[Londoner]

That is the best news. God Chosen people, USA, and North Kurdistan Defence Army, PKK Heroes, cooperate against the common enemy, Infidel State of Iraq and Syria. They will soon push these bare-footed desert nomad camel fu***kers back to their real place, Arabian deserts.

[Shirko]

Silav heval, this is what we have been telling everyone all along. Even members on this forum where some of the ones always bad mouthing PKK (Northern Kurds). And now look who has to come in and save ALL of Kurdistan

[Londoner]

Silav heval, this is what we have been telling everyone all along. Even members on this forum where some of the ones always bad mouthing PKK (Northern Kurds). And now look who has to come in and save ALL of Kurdistan

Dear Heval, it is really painful when some Kurds and their supporters label North Kurdistan Defence Army, PKK, as terrorists. It is really unbelievable.

[Anthea]

Meet the PKK 'Terrorists' Battling the Islamic State on the Frontlines of Iraq

The Kurdish counteroffensive against extremist Sunni militants in northern Iraq is now gathering speed. Local troops from Iraqi Kurdistan, known as peshmerga, are back in control of large chunks of territory — including a string of towns and villages, and the strategically important Mosul Dam — lost to a shock offensive by insurgent group the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) earlier this month.

They had help. American airstrikes pounded Islamic State positions, while deliveries of guns and ammunition from the US, Iraq's central government, and others helped strengthen the peshmerga.

Semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan had another equally important ally, although it's one that officials are not keen to talk about; a Kurdish guerrilla group that the US and the EU have branded a terrorist organization due to a history of killings and bombings on civilian and military targets during a 30-year fight for autonomy from the Turkish state.

Hundreds of fighters from the paramilitary wing of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) reinforced the peshmerga after the Islamic State advance, providing a much-needed boost in morale and fighting abilities. The new arrivals have made a decisive difference in a number of battles, often fighting under cover of US air support.

Driving along the road on the Kurdish side, the Islamic State's black flags are clearly visible fluttering in the breeze.

VICE News met with some of a group of 75 fighters that traveled south from the PKK stronghold in the Qandil Mountains on the Iran-Iraq border to the oil-rich and ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk a little over a week ago.

Losing control of this area would be a huge blow to the Kurds and, while there have not been any major clashes since the Islamic State routed the Iraqi army from nearby territory in June, the front lines are just south of the city. The rival forces are also jammed close together — driving along the road on the Kurdish side, the Islamic State's black flags are clearly visible fluttering in the breeze.

The PKK may not officially be here, but the group is active in the area — its fighters make little attempt to hide themselves, and are immediately obvious. Instead of the camouflage fatigues, body armor, and helmets favored by the peshmerga, they wear an oilve uniform of traditional loose-fitting Kurdish clothes, often paired with a keffiyeh.

While the peshmerga often look well fed and comfortable, the PKK forces are wiry, sun-beaten, and keen. There are women in their ranks too, fighting as equals alongside the men.

The PKK fighters are now defending Kirkuk as part of a mixed force of peshmerga and a few remaining Iraqi soldiers. They operate in a manner roughly analogous to a Special Forces unit — conducting covert night raids behind Islamic State lines.

They told VICE News that they were in the region to prevent the hardline insurgents capturing local non-Arab villages. Many of these are home to minority groups, such as Yazidis and Shabaks, which are considered to be infidels and singled out for persecution by the Islamic State. The PKK presence has provided peace of mind to the civilian population, who say the guerrillas have played a vital role in guarding and regaining territory from the Islamic State.

Salam Kakai, a local resident linked with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, told VICE News that the PKK had been welcomed: "People of this region are worried that the Islamic State will attack us, that they'll massacre our people and kidnap our women… but now, luckily there are Kurdish peshmerga and guerrilla fighters here, they protect the region, that is why the Islamic State couldn't advance more."

While the Kirkuk front has seen only minor skirmishes, PKK fighters have made a decisive difference in larger engagements elsewhere. When the Islamic State attacked the town of Makhmour, near the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, the peshmerga forces retreated — either tactically or in shocked chaos, depending on who you ask. Even Ali Faté, a peshmerga veteran who commands the front there, admitted they had been caught by surprise.

Faté told VICE News that the town was subsequently retaken by Kurdish forces, killing eight Islamic State fighters in the process. He added that PKK forces in the region did nothing more than defend the nearby Makhmour refugee camp. "The other Kurdish groups were effective at defending their own territory. They kept their own positions for us," Faté said.

We want the PKK and YPG to stay and protect us, the peshmerga just left, they sold us out.'

Such is the official version of events. The PKK fighters, however, tell a different story.

It was them, they say, who led the advance and forced the Islamic State to retreat, then pulled back and allowed peshmerga — who only supported from a distance during the offensive — to hold the position.

"The peshmerga forces withdrew from Makhmour, and the comrades [the PKK has Marxist-Leninist roots], stayed there, fought against ISIS and ISIS was defeated," Magid, the commander of the Kirkuk PKK group says, flashing a half smile.

"Afterwards, the peshmerga forces came with heavy weapons and they hit ISIS with Katyusha [Russian-made multiple rocket launchers]. When we captured the frontlines, there was only PKK." The guerillas were responsible for all eight Islamic State deaths, he added.

Others have told similar stories. At a refugee camp in Silopi, Turkey, Yazidis who fled the Islamic State offensive on the town of Sinjar, only to find themselves encircled on a nearby mountain of the same name, said peshmerga retreated with no warning. They claimed the only security had come from the PKK's Syrian offshoot, the People's Protection Units (YPG), which broke through Islamic State lines and provided the Yazidi with a passage to safety. "We want the PKK and YPG to stay and protect us, the peshmerga just left, they sold us out," Neber Janim, 23, told VICE News.

PKK tactics, fighting style, and ethos are all very different from the peshmerga too, which has helped them best the Islamic State in the areas they attacked. Like their opponents, they are skilled, fiercely ideological, and battle-hardened guerrilla fighters. The PKK has been fighting the Islamic State in Syria for more than two years and honed their skills in Turkey, whereas the peshmerga have not been tested in battle since before the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Magid, who is originally from Kalar in Iraqi Kurdistan, puts the PKK's effectiveness down to their training. "The comrades have education and they are professional troops. That is why ISIS is afraid of us. We are not like other forces, we have discipline and a system."

Two groups the US considers terrorists are using American weapons against each other.

Magid carefully avoids directly disparaging the peshmerga. Others are less diplomatic, however. "The peshmerga are weak and couldn't defend against ISIS in Sinjar and other regions," Rabas, 20, a fighter from Kirkuk, told VICE News.

These developments are not something that officials in the Kurdish capital of Erbil are keen to acknowledge. Peshmerga Ministry Spokesman General Halgurd Hikmat also downplayed the role of non-peshmerga troops in recent assaults on the Islamic State, at first telling VICE News that the PKK had played little part whatsoever in the fighting. After a senior officer interjected, Hikmat added: "I can say that the help from the PKK was partial and not in the broad level but at specific points."

However, lawmakers are obviously aware of the contribution the PKK has made. Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, visited a PKK camp in the aftermath of the Makhmour battle, which is a surprising turn of events given previous rivalries between his government and the group.

Having to rely on a onetime political foe will be embarrassing for Kurdish politicians, as will the fact that they even needed reinforcements. The Islamic State's advance revealed the peshmerga, which once enjoyed a fearsome earned fighting Saddam Hussein's troops, to be a less formidable fighting force than many had believed.

The PKK's terrorist group classification is even more awkward, however, given that the US is providing military aid to the peshmerga, as well as backing them with air strikes. America and its allies are barred by international law from providing weapons or training to "terrorist" organizations. Yet as the PKK fighters are at least partly integrated with the peshmerga, it is inevitably left helping one — the latest example of the Islamic State's ability to bring once opposing groups and interests together against them.

https://news.vice.com/article/meet-the- ... es-of-iraq

[Anthea]

Young Kurds From Turkey Flock To Iraq And Syria To Fight

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- Sixteen years ago, Erzihan said goodbye to her daughter. The quiet and somber Kurdish mother remembers it like it was yesterday.

“The police came to my house,” she says, sitting in a park in this Kurdish city in southeast Turkey. “And they took my child.”

Her daughter, then 20 years old, was accused of helping the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, a group deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States for its history of violent resistance against the Turkish state.

Erzihan is still waiting for the day her daughter will be released from jail. She is not alone in her grief.

For three decades, Kurds, many of them youth, have joined what is known here as “the resistance.” They’ve planned political rallies, thrown stones, and taken up arms with one goal: Freedom, and perhaps, one day, a country of their own. Thousands of Kurds have died or ended up behind bars.

But some young Kurds choose another path: The mountains.

While the trend is nothing new, the unrest raging in neighboring Syria and Iraq has lured even more young Kurds from Turkey -- some younger than 18 -- who deem their struggle and the conflicts over the border as one and the same. Young men and women are leaving home by the thousands, their parents say, to head to the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq to become fighters.

For decades, while the Kurds in Turkey fought for their own nation (a demand that has been dropped, for now), Kurdish fighters across borders were often at odds. But today, many Kurds from Turkey have joined Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq to battle the hardline jihadist group known as the Islamic State, whose fighters have claimed their goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate. The militants are known for terrorizing, kidnapping, and massacring civilians, including Kurds.

But some Kurds, like the ones here who are staging a small sit-in turned support group, say taking up arms in Turkey or elsewhere won’t solve any problems for Kurds here. They blame the PKK for recruiting their children, as well as the Turkish government they say is still routinely imprisoning and oppressing Kurds.

As the sun sets, dozens of men and women gather for a late dinner at a park. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, they share a simple meal in front of the municipal building, as they have every day for months.

Everyone in the group has lost a son or daughter to war. Some of their children are still alive -- where, they often don’t know -- and others, buried far too young.

Here, under the night sky, they battle boredom and grief by trading stories of their children.

“This became our destiny as Kurdish mothers, to lose our children,” says Amina, whose 17-year-old daughter Hava left three months ago to fight. But it’s a destiny she’s not willing to accept.

One day, Hava didn’t come home from school. Her high school friends told Amina that her daughter had joined the PKK with several male friends, something she had feared would happen.

“She didn’t say anything, but I felt it,” she says. Her daughter had been giddy the night before, as if she was waiting for something big to happen. She laughs and says she wrongly asked Hava is she had a new boyfriend -- something she scoffed at. She had bigger things to think about than boys.

Now, her daughter is training to be a fighter.

Amina gets occasional updates from the PKK on her daughter, who now has a code name, though the distressed mom doesn’t know where Hava is based.

“She’s a strong girl,” she says, in a tone that is both proud and concerned. “She’s a very beautiful girl.”

Amina pulls out her cellphone, a photo of a young, smiling girl beaming in the darkness. It’s the last picture she took of her daughter.

Hostilities between Turkey and its Kurdish minority (making up 18 percent of the country) have flared recently. A PKK attack on security forces in the city of Van killed a Turkish soldier on Tuesday. The group objects to Turkey’s recent move to build more military outposts in the southeast.

And last week, Turkey dismantled the statue of one of the PKK’s founders, Mahsum Korkmaz, prompting protest from Kurds in Diyarbakir, the unofficial Kurdish capital. At least one protester was killed, reportedly from live rounds fired by Turkish forces, and two others wounded.

Meanwhile, Kurds say peace talks with the government are going nowhere.

“We are here today to call for the Turkish state to make steps towards peace,” Amina says, rocking a silently slumbering baby boy.

Over the years, the conflict has claimed more than 40,000 lives, most of them Kurdish. The PKK declared a ceasefire in the spring of 2013, and the group’s leader instructed his fighters to withdraw to Iraq. Its fighters are now based in the Qandil mountains near where where the Iraqi, Turkish, and Iranian borders touch.

Many parents here have lost their sons and daughters to these same mountains. “I had a child in the mountains,” one mother said of her son, who joined the PKK at age 20. “But he was martyred.”

That’s where 19-year-old Hevidar, another young Kurdish woman who recently left Diyarbakir, is now.

Hevidar’s father, Razmi, says she had just finished high school before leaving to fight a year ago. When she wasn’t dreaming of going to college and studying computer science, she buried herself in political books.

Then, one day, she left a note explaining that she was ‘joining the fight to liberate the Kurds’. And with that, she was gone.

“Our identity, our language, our culture has been stolen from us for many years,” he says. “But we want this fight to end. We hope all the kids in the mountains will come home to their mothers.”

As much as he misses his daughter, and desperately wants her to come home, he says he understands and respects her choice. Many of Hevidar’s young friends never got to go to college, or join the PKK to fight. They’re in Turkish prisons.

“The kids tell me, ‘It’s better to fight in the mountains than to end up in jail and lose our lives here.’”

Angel Ucar contributed reporting from Diyarbakir.