A Kurdish Society of Soldiers

Video

PKK Guerillas Camp in Iraq

The Washington Post's Josh Partlow spent time with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, in Iraq's Zap valley this February.

» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

After President Bush met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in November to discuss the PKK problem, the guerrillas rushed to make arrangements for battle. They stashed ammunition, weapons, food and water in caves and crags throughout the mountains, for quick resupply. Inside one such cave, they installed a cylindrical, metal wood-burning stove and chimney to heat a room constructed of army green cloth and plastic tarp.

"The mountain is a school for us," said Elif, a 32-year-old commander who dropped out of interior design school in Turkey 10 years ago to join the PKK. "The mountain teaches us how to walk, it taught us how to live in cold weather, how to go without eating for a long time," she said. "The Turkish soldiers have huge bodies, but they can't stay in the snow for more than a couple hours."

In the mountains they communicate using cellphone text messages or speak in code over hand-held Yaesu radios on ever-changing frequencies. If they occupy an abandoned home, they blanket the windows to hide the light and build fires at night to hide the smoke. "We are not scared," Sarhat said. "But we are always careful."

Sarhat, a somber, serious man, joined the PKK a decade ago after working as a television reporter in Turkey. He was born to Kurdish parents in the city of Van but did not learn his ancestral language because teaching it in the schools was forbidden. As he grew older and studied Kurdish history, he felt increasingly angry that his culture was suppressed.

"Anywhere the Kurds live in Turkey, you can't act like a Kurd. You can't have your own identification, you can't have your own history or culture," he said. "I realized that they took my nation's rights, our education, our identity. Then I decided to join the PKK."

In wartime the guerrillas fill various roles. There are medics with UNICEF first-aid kits, cooks and videographers, frontline fighters and logisticians. Yet they are also uniform down to the smallest details. They smoke one brand of cigarettes, Business Royales, and nearly all wear peach-colored Turkish Mekap sneakers with orange laces.

The guerrillas are not a people's army or ad hoc insurgency, but a trained paramilitary force that requires every new recruit to attend a three-month camp to study military tactics and become indoctrinated in the ideology of the imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. The PKK's separatist war against Turkish authorities, which began in 1984 and lasted for a decade and a half, claimed the lives of about 35,000 people, mostly Kurds in southeastern Turkey.

In the PKK enclave in northern Iraq, Ocalan's chubby, mustachioed face is emblazoned on hillsides, flags and small pins the fighters wear on their vests. The reverence they exhibit toward Ocalan, captured in 1999 in Nairobi and now in a Turkish prison, borders on cultish. After assassination attempts against Ocalan in the 1990s, guerrillas immolated themselves and some became suicide bombers. To the governments of Turkey, Iraq and the United States, those tactics solidified the PKK's reputation as a terrorist organization.

"We don't want any mother in the world to have to receive the body of her dead son," said Hadar Afreen, a 26-year-old guerrilla who grew up outside Aleppo, Syria. "We don't want to fight; we want to be peaceful. But if they attack us, we will defend ourselves."

The PKK recruits many of its fighters when they are teenagers or college students and has been criticized for exploiting young people and effectively trapping them in the guerrilla force. But more than a dozen people interviewed last week said they came to the fight willingly. Some said they joined because their villages had been attacked or relatives slain by Turkish soldiers.

Afreen came to the mountains as an 18-year-old after she was told by Arab teachers she must join Syria's ruling Baath Party while in high school or face expulsion. She was familiar with the books of Ocalan and considered him a hero. She left a note for her parents saying she was joining the PKK, sneaked out of the house and has not spoken to them since.

"What I'm doing here is more important than my parents," she said.

After Erdal's speech at the funeral, the guerrillas, in solemn procession, marched the corpses up the mountainside, through wild grass meadows and over footbridges spanning two rushing creeks, until they reached their stone-walled cemetery surrounded by craters from Turkish bombs. With shovels and picks, they dug five spaces in the rows of cinder-block graves. They pushed the scraps of paper bearing names inside clear plastic bottles and placed them in the graves. Then they covered their dead with dirt and blank stone slabs and dispersed without ceremony back into the mountains.

Staff photographer Andrea Bruce and special correspondent Dlovan Brwari contributed to this report.