"why does the Bush administration allow its Kurdistan allies to harbor PKK terrorists?"

[ProSense]

Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Eighth Front

According to Turkish sources, hundreds of Turkish troops crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in hot pursuit of Kurdish terrorists. There was some skepticism about whether this incident actually occurred, and it was both affirmed and denied by various Turkish sources in the course of the day. MSNBC showed footage of the incursion, but I don't know if that was stock footage or if it showed today's events accurately (shouldn't they label these things?). A US military spokesman in Baghdad could not confirm the border incursion but said "we are very concerned." As well he should be.

A hot eighth front may have just opened up in the kaleidoscopic Iraq War, which appears to be gradually fulfilling its potential for unravelling the entire Middle East as it was constituted by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 in the aftermath of WW I.

How many fronts are there in the Iraq War? The Sunni Arab guerrillas of the center, west and north are themselves fighting a four-front war. They are fighting US troops. They are fighting Shiites. They are fighting Kurds in the Kirkuk region and Ninevah and Diyala provinces. And they are fighting other Sunni Arab forces (Baathists fight Salafi fundamentalists, and both fight tribal levies gravitating to the Americans).

Then there is a muted Shiite front with two dimensions. Radical Shiites attack US forces. And, in Basra, Diwaniya and elsewhere, there is Shiite on Shiite violence as the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (often infiltrated into the Iraqi police) fights the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.

So that makes 6-- four Sunni Arab fronts and 2 Shiite fronts.

Then there are the Kurds. Of course they are fighting the Sunni Arabs. But they have also given haven to two terrorist groups. One is the PKK, or Kurdish Worker's Party, which operates in Turkey's eastern Anatolia, blowing things up and killing people. Some 5,000 PKK fighters are holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan, to the rage of the Turkish government in Ankara. The other is PEJAK, an Iranian-Kurdish terrorist group that launches attacks in Iran. Both Iran and Turkey have lobbed mortars and artillery shells over the border into villages of Iraqi Kurdistan as a way of lodging a complaint and making a threat against these Kurdish forces.

So in addition to the Arab-Kurdish front already counted, that makes 2 more fronts, for a grand total of 8. Not all 8 are very active at all times. But all 8 do break out into substantial violence from time to time. And we may have just seen a flare-up in no. 8.

By the way, why does the Bush administration allow its Kurdistan allies to harbor PKK terrorists? I thought that sort of thing was a no-no in the age of the war on terror? Wasn't it even the casus belli for Bush's two big invasions? Or is it all right to do terrorism to Turkey and Iran, but not to the US and Britain? I'm confused.

link

A New War in Iraq?

[aquart]

1. I thought we were bring PKK into Baghdad as part of the surge.

We really need to make up our minds.

[Selatius]

2. You mean Peshmerga? Or PKK fighters? They're both Kurdish, but are different groups.

At any rate, the Peshmerga's sympathies lie with the PKK.

[aquart]

4. Yes, thank you, that is who I meant.

Well, they both start with a P.

[nealmhughes]

3. I have no idea. I wonder if Iraqi Kurdistan is not nearly as stable as it appears.

I think most Kurds are more interested in their Kurdishness than borders, per se, and that it vastly complicates matters. One Slovak in power in the old Czechoslovak in the 60s and 70s stated that "Heaven on earth is to be a Slovak in Prague, as we get the best jobs and fantastic apts. in the city." Much as Tito ensured that Slovenians got a more than fair share of top governmental jobs to ensure their loyalty to the Jugoslav state.
Turkey is founded on "Turkification," i.e., a secular state whose citizens loyalties ought to lie in the Republic and not religious sect, ancestoral language, or region. The process had actually begun earlier and was called "Ottomanization." This is a modernized version. That is why the Turks are so zealous in forcing/encouraging the use of the Turkish language only throughout the country, as a force of national unity, and the same goes for the south of the country where the Syrian border with Turkey lies, there are a lot of ethnic Arabs/Arameans there.
France did the same thing with the legal enforcement of Parisian French only as the legal language in the process of its unification (recall that Nice was Italian, and Savoy was independent), and Breton was not allowed to be used on envelopes until recently.
Oddly, the Swiss canton system seems to break all the linguistic/nationalistic/religious divides less important. To my knowledge, there is no German speaking v. Italian or French giant schism in Suisse.
Turkey is a very, very important NATO ally, our foot in the East, so to speak, and the only member in Asia. I wish that the Turks could be free from terrorism in Anatolia from the PKK, but I halfway understand how the Kurdish govt. may not be strong enough to stop incursions then escape back across the Iraq border, there may simply be too many people who are tssk tssking their actions in Iraq but aren't prepared to take active means in opposing them. It is hard to bear the title of "collaborator" or "ethnic traitor" or such ilk.

[xchrom]

5. real self determination is at the heart of politics

for many kurds.

and has been for a very long time.

but self determination is still really handled not on local fronts -- but on foreign capitals far away -- and rarely local.

i.e. the u.s., france, england and germany still get to determine whose struggle for self determination gets legitimized.