Analysis: Kurdish movement could spread war regionally

A PKK fighter taking a break en route to a winter camp. Fighting has increased to gain advantage before winter falls.

Oct. 9, 2006 issue - Murat Karayilan prefers to travel in darkness. Under cover of a starry night, his white Nissan Pathfinder crawls up a narrow gravel road in Iraq's mountainous far north to a typical-looking village house. Karayilan—his name is Turkish for "blacksnake"—is a hunted man. To the east, Iran's anti-U.S. leaders would like nothing better than to see the Kurdish guerrilla commander jailed or dead. To the west, America's longtime allies in the Turkish government feel the same. The State Department lists his group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), as a terrorist organization. "We are not terrorists," the Blacksnake tells NEWSWEEK, seated in a sparsely furnished room with a stone floor. "The U.S. has seen us through the eyes of our enemies. We want you to see us as friends."

That's not easy. Even as U.S. forces struggle against rising chaos and violence elsewhere in Iraq, the fear now is that the north could also be engulfed, thanks to Kurdish separatists' use of Iraqi soil as a staging area for their war against the Turks and the Iranians. The rebels see themselves as standing up against centuries of often brutal repression. This year the Blacksnake's guerrillas have staged more than 250 attacks on Turkey, in one bloody week killing 14 Turkish soldiers, a toll unmatched since a decade ago, at the height of the separatist conflict. Ankara keeps threatening to send its troops into Iraq to root out the rebels. Meanwhile, a PKK-affiliated group in Iraq is picking fights with Iran. In recent weeks the violence has escalated, as everyone tries to inflict as much damage as possible before winter snows interrupt the fighting.

Read the rest at Newsweek

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