Guerillas in the Mist

I'm back in northern Iraq, once again waiting for the green light from the PKK to go visit them in mountains, where the Kurdish group -- which has been fighting a vicious civil war with Turkey for more than twenty years -- maintains the camps that are the source of tension between Iraq and Turkey. A few years ago, I spent a week in these PKK training camps, and it was one of the more memorable experiences of my career: the thin air in high summer, a rocky rural idyll complete with wildflowers, fruit trees and shepherd boys playing pipes; Kurdish fighters in the pantaloons and fatigues, half of them women, many of them attractive, all of them armed to the teeth; ancient mountains, endless conflict.

But last June, when tensions between Turkey and the Kurds in northern Iraq first started escalating, the PKK turned down my request to return to the camps. They told me that Turkish spies had infiltrated the area, some of them posing as journalists, and were trying to poison their food. Now I'm having trouble even getting an interview, although this time for a different reason: they are concerned about my safety. Apparently the Turkish media has been complaining about the PKK giving interviews to the western press, and so based on this, the PKK leadership has decided we are targets for assassination and they have stopped giving interviews for now.

So once again the PKK is letting the Turks to dominate the flow of news, when there are at least 30 international journalists running around Erbil looking for something to do. If the PKK was really smart they would get one big bus, fill it with all the major outlets, coordinate with the Iraqi government and the Americans so the Turks don't dare bomb it, and drive it up to the mountains so that we call all take pictures of hot PKK guerilla girls baking bread and practicing small arms tactics amid the highland splendor. That would make the evening news.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Erbil