The PKK Ain't Going Away

A view of the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq from inside a PKK jeep, summer 2004

By now, you would think that world leaders would stop holding press conferences with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Despite the many appearances with President George Bush and American cabinet secretaries, the Maliki government has yet to make good on almost all of its promises to Washington: to stop sectarian violence, to pass an oil revenue sharing law, to make political peace with Iraq's Sunni parties, etc. By now, word should have gotten out that Maliki doesn't deliver.

But that didn't stop Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from trotting out alongside Maliki yesterday to declare that the Iraqi government had agreed to drive a Kurdish militant group -- the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK -- out of the mountains of northern Iraq, where PKK fighters and activists maintain training camps.

Turkey has been threatening to invade Iraq unless someone does something about the PKK, which has long been at war with the Turkish state over the rights of Turkey's Kurdish minority. In recent months, fighting between the Turkish army and the PKK has intensified inside Turkey, and the Turks accuse the PKK of a terrorist bombing campaign against Turkish cities. In response, the Turkish army has massed tanks and thousands of soldiers at the border with Iraq.

Unfortunately for Erdogan, there's nothing Maliki can do about the PKK. His government's armed forces can't even keep Baghdad safe, let alone mount an expedition in northern Iraq, which, by the way, isn't even part of Maliki's military jurisdiction. There are no federal Iraqi soldiers there -- just Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga units controlled by the largely autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).

And Iraq's Kurdish leaders aren't about to send their soldiers off on a treacherous struggle with hardened guerilla fighters in difficult terrain. Iraq's Kurds fought the PKK once before in the 1990's, and they're not looking forward to repeating the ugly experience. Plus, the Iraqi Kurds say their pesh merga are already stretched thin. Besides keeping Arab terrorists out of the KRG, pesh merga are also helping the Iraqi army in Mosul and Baghdad.

Nor for that matter, is there anything the Turkish army can do about the PKK in Iraq. The PKK's bases aren't even near the Turkish border; they are in the remote Qandil valley near Iran, far from the reach of Turkey's ground forces. The Turkish army would have to penetrate deep into Iraq and travel through several Iraqi cities before reaching the Qandil valley, by which time the PKK's mobile guerilla units would have long since snuck away to fight another day. And even if the Turkish air force got US permission to cross into Iraq, air strikes have a limited effect on a guerilla insurgency.

The fact is that there isn't a military solution to the PKK. Turkey has fought with them since the 1980's to no avail. The Turkish threat to invade Iraq is only turning a Turkish civil war into a regional crisis. Hopefully, Erdogan realizes this and his "agreement" with Maliki is a stalling tactic aimed at pacifying Turkey's restive generals. Unfortunately, the PKK problem isn't going away. If fighting continues inside Turkey, it will only be a matter of time before Turkish sabers start rattling again.

A PKK fighter in northern Iraq, summer 2004

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut