(HOST) The war in Iraq has become further complicated as key American ally and NATO member Turkey has come under terrorist attack by Kurdish rebels, operating from Iraq’s Kurdish region. As commentator Barrie Dunsmore explains, this new crisis should come as no surprise.
(DUNSMORE) The roughly five million Kurds of Northern Iraq make up about 20 percent of Iraq’s population. Although they are mostly Sunni Muslims, ethnically, they are not Arabs. After the 1991 Gulf War, America and the Europeans set up no fly zones in Iraq to protect the Kurds from persecution by Saddam Hussein, who had used poison gas against them in the late 1980’s. Since the American invasion, the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq has thrived and developed into an almost totally autonomous state – with its own government, army and flag. Kurds pay lip-service to the national government in Baghdad, but not much else.
For many Kurds, that autonomy may be enough. But the most radical among them want a fully independent Kurdistan that would include the millions of other Kurds who are spread out in that mountainous region where the borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran come together. For many centuries, these mountain people were free to develop their own identity. But with the new states and boundaries created by the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War I, the Kurds were forced to assimilate, especially in Turkey where about half of them remain. For many decades Kurds in Turkey were banned from speaking their own language, listening to their own music and reading their own literature.
In recent years, those bans have been somewhat relaxed, but for militant groups such as the Kurdish Workers Party known as the PKK, the millions of Turkish Kurds should become part of fully independent, Greater Kurdistan. A similar group of Kurdish rebels is trying to foment rebellion among Iranian Kurds. The PKK, which regularly uses terrorist tactics, numbers in the few thousands. But by attacking Turkey, it is deliberately trying to draw Turkish reprisals and so ignite the smoldering Turkish hatred, quite common among Iraqi Kurds. That might not be too difficult. The other day when Iraq’s President Talabani, who is a Kurd, was asked about Turkish demands that the Iraq government arrest the Kurdish terrrorists and turn them over to the Turks, he scoffed that he would not turn over even a Kurdish cat to the Turks.
Which brings us to the current crisis. It is tempting to say that all this was predictable. Inevitably, at some point Turkey was going to feel threatened by having an independent Kurdish state evolving on its border, directly adjacent to its own Kurdish population. That point has now been reached.
This week, President Bush and his team have been pressing Turkey not to launch an all out invasion into Iraq while also trying to persuade Iraq’s national government and its Kurds, to take action against their own guerrillas. Some modest steps to this end were announced Tuesday. But if diplomacy should fail, clashes between the Turkish Army and the main Kurdish forces known as the Peshmerga would become more probable – and that would make America’s role in Iraq ever more precarious.
Barrie Dunsmore is a veteran diplomatic and foreign correspondent for A-B-C News, now living in Charlotte.