Pretty Young Kurdish Killers

On my last post about how the PKK -- the Kurdish rebel group fighting Turkey -- is missing a public relations opportunity by not showing off their fearsome and seductive female guerillas, a reader commented that I have a "jejune" attitude towards women. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. Let me assure you that I have a jejune attitude towards both sexes.

To prove it, here's a beefcake shot of two strapping young male PKK fighters drying themselves on hot, black sand after swimming in the bone-chilling waters of a mountain stream in northern Iraq. Can you say PKK underwear campaign?

I took the photo in the summer of 2004, when I visited a camp of a Kurdish feminist group associated with the PPK which ran a re-education course called "Killing the Man" which tries to teach men how not to be sexist.

Now you might think that gender-sensitivity training in the tribal regions of northern Iraq might deal with some practical subjects, such as ending honor killings and child marriages. But "Killing the Man" actually resembles freshman orientation at a politically-correct American university: about 20 men sit in a circle and -- guided buy a female discussion leader -- talk about French philosophy and quantum physics and identify ways in which their thinking is dominated by patriarchal attitudes and a barely conscious belief that their gender is a source of power. The role of the course in PKK ideological training is to show how resisting the authoritarian nature of the Turkish state is only possible if individual Kurds destroy their own inner authoritarian. Only then can they create a society based on harmony and equality across boundaries of race, religion, and gender.

The PKK's progressive attitude accounts for the fact that about half of the PKK's fighters are women. As if they were Quakers, they refer to each other not as soldiers, but as "friends": men are "boyfriends" and women are "girlfriends." However, there are in fact no real boyfriends and girlfriends -- sexual and romantic relations are forbidden.

Playing volleyball and eating watermelon with the boyfriends and girlfriends of the PKK in the mountains where Asia Minor meets the Persian plateau is about as Edenic an experience as you can imagine. But like all descendants of Adam and Eve, they are still marked by an original sin: in this case the attempt to solve the Kurdish question through violence. Though they now say they have renounced violence except in self defense, and have many times called ceasefires, the war they started in the 1980's is now out of control. They can talk about eco-femminist anti-authoritarianism all they want. The Turks aren't listening.

So yes, dear reader, a sexy PKK PR campaign might not mean a damn thing. But at least where there's lust, there's life. When I now look at my photos of these beautiful young killers, I wonder who's alive and whose dead.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Erbil