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Meet the Kurdish guerrillas who want to
topple the Tehran regime
13.6.2006
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Iran Bombs Iraq
QANDIL, Kurdistan-Iraq—The very large potential
bombs being built in Iran, as well as the somewhat
smaller real bombs detonating in Baghdad, have
distracted attention from the pitiless barrage of
medium-sized ones that Iran lobbed into Iraq last
month. In the first week of May, the Iranian
military sent hundreds of artillery shells and
Katyusha rockets whistling over the mountaintops
into Iraq's Qandil region.
As soon as the blasts began, most of the local
villagers jumped into Land Cruisers, pickups, and
tractors and fled for the nearby cities of
Qala'at-Diza and Raniya. They came back a week later
and found many of their sheep blown up or starving
to death.
Iran had little interest in the sheep, or, for that
matter, in the Iraqi Kurds whose villages they
destroyed. Tehran was aiming at the Iranian Kurdish
guerrillas who during the last two years have become
Tehran's most noisome domestic pest and who openly
seek ways to become an international irritant as
well.
The Iranian Kurds hate the conservative, ethnically
Persian government, and they want federal autonomy
in Iran to match their Iraqi Kurdish cousins'
arrangement next door. To prove they're serious, the
Kurds have rioted nonstop in Iran's Kurdistan
province since 2005, and snipers from the Kurdistan
Free Life Party (known as PJAK), the Iranian Kurdish
guerrilla movement, have even been taking potshots
at Iran's Revolutionary Guards, killing dozens. |
Guerrillas in the Shahid Harun (Aaron the Martyr)
camp
Photo: Slate |
The Qandil Mountains are Iraqi soil, but no Iraqi
government agent has set foot there on official
business for years. They are a steep and dramatic
range, with folds and crenelations seemingly
terra-formed to shelter the Kurdish rebels who run
the area. The guerrillas prowl around with
Kalashnikovs, levy taxes on the local Iraqis, and
from camouflaged aeries monitor who ventures into
their tiny territory. A few hours' hike away—across
a border so textured with ravines and peaks as to be
essentially unsecurable—lies Iran.
PJAK fled to the Qandils in 2004, under the mistaken
impression that Iran would not hunt down its members
if they were on Iraqi land. They joined members of
the Kurdistan Workers Party (known as PKK), the
Maoist rebel force that for more than a decade has
been fighting Turkey. To many Turks, these training
camps inspire the same fear and loathing that al-Qaida's
old Afghan bases inspire in the rest of the Western
world. (One possibility is that Iran, fast losing
friends over its uranium fetish, shelled the Kurds
as a goodwill gesture to Turkey, whose relationship
with Washington makes bombing Iraq awkward.) A PKK
military commander, Xabat Gelo, said that, like the
Taliban holdouts in Afghanistan, the PKK and PJAK
could hunker in caves for months, eating withered
tomatoes and blocks of hardtack, to wait out air
raids.
Even in these relatively peaceful times, their camps
barely exceed Neolithic comfort levels. In almost a
week of living among the guerrillas, I ate nothing
more complicated than a French fry. I slept in
dwellings literally built into the sides of
mountains, with plastic sheets to keep clods of the
mud wall from crumbling onto my face during the
night. But the guerrillas looked healthy and seemed
happy enough to be living in a place where Kurdish
is the dominant tongue and where the landscape is
lovelier than in any soap commercial or Bollywood
dance number. Indeed, the terrain exudes rude
health: The snowmelt water tastes sweet straight
from the stream, and the thin mountain air smells
fresh, especially if you're upwind of the sheep
dung.
The Iranian Kurdish militia probably numbers less
than 1,000 in Qandil and thousands more underground
in Iran. It recruits female guerrillas and boasts
that its cruelest and fiercest fighters are Iranian
women drawn to the movement's radical feminism. Even
the Westernized Turkish soldiers who temporarily
seized my digital camera on the way back into Turkey
from Iraq gave low, disgusted whistles as they
looked at photos of the girls, some as young as 16,
merrily toting Kalashnikovs along mountain trails.
The guerrillas pride themselves on godlessness and
sexual freedom, although they are celibate. Their
version of sexual liberation is facile (one party
member asked, "What is your opinion of sexual
intercourse?"; before I could answer, he said he
thought it was "very good"), but for many young
Iranians, swapping a chador for a grenade launcher
is a sweet deal indeed.
Iran would not have pulverized a whole Iraqi
mountainside so unsubtly unless it saw a foe worth
risking an international incident to snuff out.
Although a latecomer to the insurgency game in the
Middle East, PJAK seems to have thought shrewdly
about its Kurdish forerunners' blunders and
successes. The PKK, its direct ancestor, lost the PR
game early by blowing up public squares, kidnapping
journalists, and generally acting as though it was
trying to open a Kurdish franchise of the Khmer
Rouge. PJAK central committee member Zanar Agri says
his party still venerates the PKK's imprisoned
leader, Abdullah Ocalan (a man who ordered the
execution of his own wife, Kesire, for political
dissent). But Agri also says Ocalan made mistakes,
and that in owning up to them, he has turned
completely to "democracy, federalism, and human
rights," the three values PJAK now takes as a
slogan.
These words are not quite coded speech, but they are
PJAK's way of batting its eyelashes at the United
States, of implying that the world's superpower and
this ornery Maoist gang might find common cause
against Tehran. Most of the freedoms Turkish Kurds
have been eager to spill blood over have been
available in Iran for years; Iran constitutionally
recognizes the Kurds' language and minority ethnic
status, and there is no taboo against speaking
Kurdish in public. The PJAK Kurds want more: They
want secular democracy, they say, and they want the
United States to go into Iran to deliver it to them.
Kurds enthusiastically boycotted the sham election
that won Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Iran's presidency last
year, and they speak of him in doomsday terms that
would fit in at the American Enterprise Institute
but sound awkward in this rebel camp where
everyone's heroes are Che Guevara and Spartacus.
"Ahmadinejad does not respect the Sunnis. He thinks
they are agents of Israel and the USA," says PJAK
spokesman Ihsan Warya, an ex-lawyer from Kermanshah.
(Most Kurds are Sunni.) Warya nevertheless points
out that PJAK really does wish it were an agent of
the United States, and that they're disappointed
that Washington hasn't made contact.
PJAK has watched how Kurds in Iraq have won their
autonomy, and its strategy is to duplicate those
efforts in Iran. After the first U.S. war against
Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Kurds seized the moment to
massacre local Baathists and create a de facto
independent Kurdish state. They then waited for a
decade to act as a proxy for the United States in
executing a coup de grâce against Saddam.
The Iranian Kurds in Qandil are eager to do the same
against Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs in
Tehran—first by working with other Sunni minorities
to destabilize the central government's hold on
Kurdish areas, then by waiting for Washington to
come in and help it make Kurdish autonomy official.
"Ahmadinejad waits for Imam-e Zaman," says Warya,
referring to the quasi-messianic "hidden" imam whose
return Twelver Shiites await as a day of righteous
vindication. "Kurdish people say Imam-e Zaman is
George W. Bush."
slate com
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