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akrawi1 -> RE: Iraqi Kurd's Doom (10/28/2007 3:00:40 AM)
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Last News A haven for Kurdish rebels who await the Turks PKK fighters train in Iraq's northern mountains, sheltered by the terrain and by villagers who hail them as champions of their rights. By Asso Ahmed, Special to The Times October 28, 2007 MARDU, IRAQ -- It is a land of resistance, the mountain peaks and winding valleys where Iraq's Kurds battled Saddam Hussein for decades. Now another generation of guerrillas is bunkered down waving the flag of Kurdish nationalism in the Qandil mountains, this time in a fight against Turkey. Iraqi Kurds and members of the Turkish separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, live together in this vast mountain range that straddles Iraq, Turkey and Iran. The haven provided to the Turkish Kurd rebels here infuriates the Turkish government in Ankara, which has been locked in an intense conflict with the Kurdish separatist movement that has cost thousands of lives since the 1980s. With as many as 100,000 Turkish troops poised to march across the Iraqi border to attack PKK camps, a military response to a rebel ambush in southern Turkey last week that killed 12 soldiers, Iraqi Kurds may now pay a steep price for ignoring the problems caused by the PKK presence in the north. "Iraqi Kurds generally sympathize with PKK fighters. It is a force that has been demanding and fighting for the rights of Kurds in Turkey for tens of years now, and the Turks have been very harsh to their Kurdish community by forbidding them from rights," said Asso Hardi, editor-in-chief of Awena, an independent newspaper in the city of Sulaymaniya in Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdistan region. "On the other hand, many Iraqi Kurds view the PKK as an entity . . . which has caused many problems to the relatively stable Kurdistan area of Iraq, especially with neighboring countries." Up a winding series of switchbacks lies Mardu village, northeast of Sulaymaniya. Kurdish farmers tend livestock and harvest peaches, apples and grapes. A few houses among dotted oak trees serve as a makeshift headquarters for the PKK. Male and female fighters, dressed in traditional billowing shalwar pants and olive combat tops, walk freely. Local Iraqis openly support them, and some Iraqi Kurds have left city life and their families to become soldiers with the Turkish Kurd rebels and their Iranian sister movement, Party for Free Life In Kurdistan, or PEJAK. The villagers toast the guerrillas as champions of Kurdish rights. They say they are willing to endure sacrifices as the price of their association with a movement fighting to establish Kurdish self-rule in Turkey and Iran, where they believe their minority's basic privileges are denied. "Three times I lost my house but I never scorned the Kurdish movement. The PKK and PEJAK have been in our village for years," said farmer Mohammed Wasso, 64, whose property was destroyed during the Iraqi Kurds' hard-fought war against Hussein's forces. Some describe the PKK as a vital trading partner and protector in a lawless area. Hussein Rashid, 45, regularly hauls gasoline and kerosene from Iran to sell to the guerrillas. He warned, "If the PKK is not here, then this will be a place for terrorism and Iran will send Ansar al Islam," a Sunni extremist group with links to Al Qaeda.
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