QANDIL MOUNTAIN RANGE, Iraq -- Sunrise came to the women's camp in shafts of white light through woven roofs, but Aristan Manzur slept past 10. She had a fever again, and fluid blocked the air in her lungs.
She woke and walked slowly down a rocky path to the stream for a breakfast of tea, cream-filled cookies and cigarettes. Soon she hiked back to her bed of dusty blankets to sleep.
Manzur, 21, had trained to become a Kurdish guerrilla leader since she was 10. Her group, formerly known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, but renamed the People's Congress of Kurdistan, or Kongra-Gel, fought the Turkish government in a 15-year civil war that left 30,000 people dead. But in 1999, the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured, and the guerrillas retreated to these stony mountain passes of northern Iraq.
This summer, several thousand of the rebels returned to Turkey and resumed attacks against the military. But Manzur and a few thousand other rebels remained in the Qandil mountain range, no longer wanting to fight.
Those who stayed behind form a guerrilla force without a war -- a lethargic, semi-retired group of former fighters, with many ill and homesick members among them. But they still have weapons, and Turkey remains wary of their intentions. Their presence in northern Iraq is a source of pressure and volatility in the one part of the country that has been mostly calm.
Turkey, which maintains special forces troops in northern Iraq, is pressuring the U.S. and Iraqi governments to quash the Kurdish guerrillas, and the Turkish prime minister said recently that his patience was "wearing thin." Iraqi and U.S. officials have said they are not ready to fight the guerrillas to get them to leave the mountains.
"Iraqi forces have too many things on their plate" to fight in the Qandil range, the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, said in a telephone interview. "The new Iraq definitely will not tolerate the presence of armed foreign militias on its territory."
Many of the guerrillas say they want to leave the mountains but do not have a safe way to do so. Most of them are from Turkey, where they would likely be imprisoned if they returned. Few have ID cards or documents from any country.
In the past, Turkey has offered limited amnesty to guerrillas who had not killed anyone, on condition they inform on their comrades. Few of them surrendered. Many now say a broader amnesty could lure them out of the mountains.
"People want to go down from the mountains and participate in political change," said Murat Karayilan, 48, a vice president of the Kongra-Gel, an umbrella organization for about eight Kurdish rebel groups. "For the last five years, we've been telling the Turks to solve it this way. No one has been listening."
Namik Tan, a spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry, said: "There will never be an amnesty program for terrorists. People who killed others, innocent people, how could you offer them amnesty?"
In the cool, fresh air of a recent night, Zalal Anitos, 26, sat on a blanket and explained that she had been trained to fight since she was a child.
When she was 11, she said, Turkish soldiers burned down her house in a Kurdish village in southeastern Turkey, killing her uncle. On nights that followed, she said, government helicopters bombed the area, killing her neighbors.
The Turkish government had outlawed the Kurdish language, and at home, her family spoke in whispers. But Anitos said she barely spoke at all.
