WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- The protest sign was plain enough, black ink on white poster board. But the message Jamel Numan was carrying amidst 200 of America’s Iraqi Kurds rallying outside the White House Monday was both simply blunt and highlighted the overlooked complexity of Turkey’s beef with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party guerrillas: “Is this really about PKK? Or is this about Kirkuk?”
Numan, a 53-year-old now living in Nashville, a hub of American Kurds, echoed the fears of Kurds -- that Turkey is amassing troops on their border “so they can take over the Kurdish region of Iraq.”
Inside the White House Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Bush discussed Turkey’s threats to take military action against the Turkish Kurd separatist strongholds in Iraqi mountains on the other side of the Turkish border.
An estimated 3,000 PKK guerrillas are based in the Qandil Mountains, where Turkey alleges the most recent of the PKK’s decades-old campaign has been planned. Eight kidnapped Turkish troops were released Sunday in a brief slowdown of bluster between the sides. But the PKK, which the United States and Turkey recognize as a terrorist group, has killed dozens of troops and citizens in attacks in recent months.
The separatist group’s original goal was for an independent country of Kurdistan -- and tens of thousands of innocent people were killed in their fight in the 1980s -- but now it wants more autonomy and cultural recognition by Turkey.
Turkey has made numerous limited incursions into northern Iraq in the past, but the PKK remains. Meanwhile, Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government has capitalized on its own semi-autonomy since 2003, creating a rare zone in Iraq of relative security, political evolution and economic success. The KRG, which contains only 0.5 percent of Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, announced Tuesday it signed seven new exploration and development oil deals with foreign companies and formed its own KRG-owned oil company.
Kirkuk is the city Iraqi Kurds want to make their capital, drenched in oil but cut from Iraq’s Kurdish provinces when Saddam Hussein redrew the boundaries. He forced out Kurds, as well as Turkomen and residents of other ethnicities, replacing them with Sunni Arabs.
The city is an increasing hotbed of violence as a controversial referendum draws near. Voters in Kirkuk and other disputed territories currently outside the KRG's authority will decide whether to join it. The referendum, called for in the 2005 constitution -- an inclusion that’s an example of the power Iraq’s Kurds wield throughout Iraq -- is behind schedule.
It’s likely to miss the year-end deadline and increase tensions between Iraq’s Kurdish and Arab leaders. Turkey has already weighed in, fearing adding Kirkuk’s estimated 11 billion barrels of proven reserves to KRG control would bolster the northern Iraq region’s autonomy and empower its own Kurdish population. Iran -- which along with Syria, Iraq and Turkey is home to more than 22 million Kurds, according to the CIA’s World Factbook -- has called for delaying the referendum.
Kirkuk is also the starting point of two pipelines that export oil to Turkey. The pipelines have a total capacity of 1.6 million barrels per day, but attacks from Sunni insurgents have kept them offline more than online since the start of the U.S.-led war in March 2003.
Turkish companies are the biggest investor in the KRG, though the Turkish government channels all official diplomatic and economic dialogue through Baghdad.
Turkey demands Washington, Baghdad and the KRG do more to prevent the PKK from operating and accuse KRG officials of aiding the “terrorist organization which has deployed itself in northern Iraq,” Erdogan said at a joint, albeit brief, news conference with Bush following their meeting Tuesday.
The two talked of the increased importance of sharing intelligence, “and it is important that we fight jointly against the leaders, the murderers of this organization,” Erdogan said. U.S. and Turkish military leaders will communicate more, but Bush and Erdogan didn’t weigh in on any specific actions. Erdogan said he would delay any military decisions until after the meeting.
The United States is stuck between Turkey and the Kurds, U.S. allies in their own right, and is having trouble satisfying both.
This year is the war’s deadliest for U.S. troops, and Washington’s hawk talk over Iran is increasing, so another war front, especially one inside the Iraq adventure’s only empirical success story, will have long legs and leave heavy footprints.
“Clearly the Turks got themselves into a pickle by pressing for change when clearly the Americans weren’t going to give them the green light to go into Iraq,” said Joost Hiltermann, director of the International Crisis Group's Middle East Project. Now the United States must “help Turkey down without alienating the Kurds in Iraq.”
Turkey sees the KRG position as “a situation where they’re depending on Turkey and depending on the central government and need to be reminded every so often not to let the PKK roam freely," Hiltermann said.
“It’s PKK and its Kirkuk, those are the two issues. Everything else, it can be resolved.”
“Of course, (Turkey) should be finding a political solution to the Kurds in Turkey and not a military one," he said, but Turkey's civilian and military leadership are at loggerheads in Ankara and the PKK is a flashpoint.
The Turkish Parliament last month authorized military action -- to what extent remains to be seen. There are an estimated 100,000 or more troops on the border. Airstrikes, however, have been tossed out as the best way to combat the PKK, who are more familiar with the mountainous terrain.
“You don’t send 100,000 troops to fight 3,000 guerrillas,” 22-year-old Kovan Morat of Nashville said just after the throng of his fellow Kurdish protestors approached a dozen pro-Turkish flag-wavers across from the White House. Police and Kurdish leaders made a human barrier preventing any physical interaction.
“Kirkuk is Kurdistan and would ensure Kurdish people of an identity … and economically stabilize Kurdistan and the move to independence,” Morat said. “They don’t want to let this happen.”
Iraq’s Kurdish population may feel the wrath of Turkey’s response to the PKK, but they by and large feel it’s a problem of Turkey’s making.
“It’s (Turkey’s) failure to deal with the PKK problem,” said 28-year-old Fatima Sindy of Manassas, Va., one of the leaders of Monday’s protest, “to deal with its internal problems.”
“Turkey is not afraid of the PKK,” she said. “It’s afraid of an independent Kurdish state.”
KRG President Massoud Barzani, co-leader of Iraqi Kurds along with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, agrees.
"Honestly, I am about to be convinced that the PKK is only an excuse and that part of the real target is the Kurdistan region itself," Barzani told Time Magazine.
“If they invade and enter the Iraqi Kurdistan region and they attack us, of course we have to defend ourselves,” Barzani said. “If they attack our people, our interests, our territories, then there will be no limit."
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