Kurds Train to Battle Iran
By KATHY GANNON Associated Press Writer
February 02,2007 | QANDIL MOUNTAIN RANGE, Iraq
-- Deep in the mountains of eastern Iraq, a cluster of mud huts and the chatter
of machine gun fire reveal another piece of the jigsaw puzzle called Kurdistan.
Here, recruits are training to fight Iran, one
of the four countries that rule the fractured Kurdish people. And although they
belong to an organization officially outlawed as terrorist by Washington, they
appear to be operating unhindered from Iraqi territory controlled by U.S.
forces.
A boulder-studded road spirals up through
sun-soaked mountains to a pale yellow building that flies the flag of the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), condemned as a terrorist organization by the U.S.
and its NATO ally, Turkey.
A giant face of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK
founder who is serving a life sentence in Turkey, is painted on the
mountainside. Ten miles farther on lies the Qandil range, which runs like a
snow-dusted spine along Iraq's northern border with both Turkey and Iran.
In the camp, lugging heavy machine guns and
AK-47 assault rifles, are men and women of the Party for a Free Life in
Kurdistan, or PEJAK, an offshoot set up by the PKK in 2004 to fight for Kurdish
autonomy in Iran.
The PKK and its affiliates are spread through a
region of some 35 million Kurds that straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
PEJAK, the newest group, claims to number thousands of recruits, and targets
only Iran -- a mission which has made PEJAK the subject of intense speculation
that it is being used to undermine the radical Islamic regime of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In the Nov. 27 issue of The New Yorker,
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that PEJAK was receiving support from
the U.S. as well as from Israel, which fears Iran's nuclear ambitions and
Ahmadinejad's call to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
PEJAK says it regularly launches raids into
Iran, and Iran has fired back with artillery. In October the English-language
Iran Daily, published by Iran's official news agency, said Iran accused PEJAK of
killing dozens of its armed forces in insurgent attacks.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a presidential
candidate who claims the White House is overplaying the Iranian threat, last
year wrote to President Bush expressing concern that the U.S. was using PEJAK to
weaken Ahmadinejad.
James Brandon, an analyst for the U.S.-based
Jamestown Foundation, told The Associated Press that PEJAK has refused to
discuss its funding sources. But he said its greatest threat to Iran is not
military. It has veins running deep into the Iranian Kurdish population and is
offering to join forces with other restless minorities in Iran, he said.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev
said "Israel is not involved in any way in what's going on there."
Meir Javedanfar, an Israel-based Iran expert,
noted however that Israel has a long-standing relationship with Iraqi Kurdish
leader Mustafa Barzani and "It would not surprise me to discover that Israel is
using the Kurdish areas of Iraq to undermine Iran's influence in Iraq and
monitor what's going on along the Iranian border, as well as to undermine the
Iranian government itself."
The AP recently spent two winter days at a
PEJAK training camp tucked in the shadow of the Qandil Mountains in northern
Iraq, listening to its followers describe their goals and operations in Iran.
According to a camp commander, Hussein Afsheen,
"PKK gives ideological and logistical support" while funding comes from Iranian
Kurds. He said he didn't know of U.S. funding, but would gladly accept it.
The camp is designed to toughen up the new
recruits, who numbered 38 during the AP's visit. Beds are single wool blankets
spread over a rough concrete floor, or over a narrow steel bench that hugs an
icy mud wall. The only heat comes from a wood-fired potbelly stove.
It's still pitch dark and freezing at 5 a.m.,
when the fighters line up and pledge allegiance to the Kurdish cause.
Soztar Afreen, a 22-year-old Syrian with a
quick smile, says she joined five years ago and the first months were tough.
"I had trouble keeping up. You have to toughen
yourself. The physical work is difficult but once you get used to it life here
gets easier," she said.
She recalled that her parents, PKK
sympathizers, sent her off with this plea: "Don't let down the struggle; make us
proud."
Gunfire and explosions echo off mountainsides
as recruits learn to fire artillery and rocket launchers and automatic rifles.
They are taught to lay ambushes and to endure long hours isolated and in hiding.
Food is spartan -- potatoes, tomato broth,
onions and a lot of bread baked flat in a deep stone oven.
Much time is spent in ideological training and
studying Ocalan's vision of a united Kurdistan, which the guerrillas say has
gradually shifted from demanding full-blown independence to settling for
autonomy as a distinct culture within the various countries where they live.
PEJAK ideology is rigorously leftist and
includes equality of the sexes -- unusual in this region. The camp has two
leaders, a man and a woman.
The male one, Afsheen, is a Turkish Kurd who
joined the PKK in 1990, at age 19. He said he enlisted after Turkish soldiers
herded him, his family and his neighbors into the town square and burned down
their homes.
Four shepherds were coming home and "The
soldiers just opened fire on them. I had inside of me a lot of anger. I promised
I would get my revenge," said Afsheen.
In training, "Recruits were put in a cave and
left there for a month, allowed out only for half an hour each day. We walked
for hours in frigid water," he said.
Afsheen said he has made several forays into
Iran, including one monthlong trek to the Iranian town of Shahha three months
ago, not to attack Iranians but to organize Kurds. "We were discovered. There
was a firefight and it went on until dark. We were pinned down, trapped," he
said.
"At nightfall we found an opening and we tried
to slip out but we were discovered. The firing went on again and they called in
their helicopters. One of our friends was wounded and three Iranian security men
were killed."
Afsheen's co-leader is Beridon Dersim, who grew
up in Austria and found her identity with the PKK.
"What I wanted I couldn't find from Turkey. I
couldn't find from Europe. The PKK offered me answers about myself, about my
ethnicity."
Dersim, 32, said she wanted to pick up a gun
the day she joined the PKK at 17 but it was just before her 20th birthday that
she was allowed into the guerrilla ranks.
Unlike Afreen of Syria, she did not have her
family's blessing, she says, and her father, a Turkish civil servant, was
tortured and left in a wheelchair. She said she has since fought in gunbattles.
The guerrillas vow not to marry or visit their
families lest they put them in danger or be distracted from their struggle.
Afsheen said he hasn't seen his parents since their village was destroyed 16
years ago. "I was the youngest of nine children, but maybe there are more now. I
don't know."
Dersim says her presence encourages Kurdish
women but also frightens the men.
"We go to a village and when we speak they are
surprised and they ask us: 'Where do you get such power to do this? How can you
speak like this and in front of men?'"
