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Married to the cause, Kurdish rebels leave
love behind
9.5.2006
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MOUNT QANDIL,
Kurdistan-Iraq, May 9, 2006 (AFP) - For this
Kurdish teenager, joining a quasi-socialist rebel
movement deep in the mountains on the Iraq-Iran
frontier was a way to escape becoming a Muslim
housewife in ultra-orthodox Iran.
Three months ago, Shilan ran away from her family in
Iran to walk across dangerous mountain passes in
order to reach Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) camps
at their hideouts in Iraq.
The 18-year-old said that after a neighbor in the
Iranian city of Meriwan introduced her to the
ideologically charged literature of the
Turkish-Kurdish PKK guerrilla movement, she decided
to join them to achieve "emancipation" and escape
married life.
"I don't want to be controlled. In Iran you can't
speak freely, a woman can't walk alone, you can't
listen to music," the doe-eyed fighter said as she
pushed long brown locks away from her face.
Dressed in a gray tunic, baggy pants and the PKK's
trademark yellow sneakers, Shilan spoke with a
Kalashnikov rifle slung over her shoulder as a
fellow woman fighter leaned her weapon, a heavy
machine gun, against a boulder to listen in.
"I like the military life. But I'm not here just for
myself, I'm fighting for all of Kurdistan," she told
AFP.
Joining the PKK, whose declared goals are to forge
an independent Kurdistan out of the majority Kurdish
areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria through a
"socialist democratic" revolution, is not without
its restrictions.
Sexual relations among the atheist ranks are
strictly forbidden, as is the consumption of
alcohol, while members are required to cut links
with the outside world and leave personal
possessions behind.
"We are married to our cause. It's something that's
very hard for an outsider to understand. We are here
to fight," said fighter Qasim Engin.
"Those who can't live with this have to go back
home," said Engin, a guerrilla with piercing eyes
from Turkey's southeast and a veteran of 18 years
spent fighting Turks, Iranians, Arabs and sometimes
rival Kurdish factions.
"I don't regret that I won't have a family. If I got
married in Iran I would be stuck in the same
situation for the rest of my life," added Shilan.
The green, cloud blanketed valley houses one of an
unknown number of camps that lace the valleys and
mountain sides of an area where Iraq, Turkey and
Iran meet.
Turkey says some 5,000 armed PKK militants have
found refuge in northern Iraq, and the group is
blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Turkey,
the European Union and the United States.
Despite recent tensions in the region, fighters were
relaxed enough to take up a game of volleyball in
between political lessons and mandatory readings
from some of the dozens of books written by
imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan is serving a life sentence in a Turkish
prison.
Teenage recruit Dilbirin described the strictly
regulated daily routine of a rebel in training.
The day begins at 4:45 am with sports, then
breakfast, rest, political lessons, lunch, more
political lectures, followed by political reading
and radio broadcasts.
In a few weeks time, the recruits will move on to
military training, he said.
The organization was founded as a political party in
the 1970s by Ocalan and a handful of 'Havals', or
comrades, but transformed itself into a guerrilla
movement that initially targeted land-owning Kurds
deemed to be "collaborating" with the Turkish
authorities.
It has since taken on the Turkish army in a conflict
that has claimed some 37,000 lives, most of them in
majority-Kurd southeastern Anatolia, while the PKK
has moved much of its fighting force to
Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq since the 1980s.
They are respected and romanticized by ordinary
Kurds for their dedication to their cause.
But some former rebels say that living by the PKK's
unwritten rules can be a bitter experience.
"Everything is different there, even the ethics were
different up there in the mountains," said Bawar,
who spent six months in the PKK's ranks before
making a nighttime escape across the Iraqi border
into Iran in 1999.
"I don't regret my experience there, but they
brainwashed me and shaped my personality. It's who I
am today," said Bawar who now lives in Sulaimaniyah
in Iraq. He joined the PKK when he was 17.
Bawar, who did not give his real name, said he never
found the strength to cut all links with his family
and when he expressed his desire to leave he was
accused of being a spy.
"That made me fear for my life because during the
lectures they always said that those who retreated
from battle or spied on the PKK would be found..."
Eventually, he made his getaway into the mountains
after telling a night watchman he needed to relieve
himself.
"Now I believe that the ideas of the PKK don't fit
with my views. I have a different life, with a
family."
AFP
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