The Banished and the Bombed ... the PKK at war with Turkey

It was a message he knew for sure would resonate from this rugged region along the Iraq-Iran border down through Turkey and beyond to the corridors of power in Washington and Europe.

“The Kurds will defend themselves to the end,” Bayik warned.

As the eyes of the world focus on the war in Syria and Iraq where Kurds are heavily involved in the fighting there, another war, that between the PKK and Turkey has gone largely unreported.

There are very specific reasons why this is so. To begin with the PKK itself is generally viewed as something of an ostricised political entity.

In Turkey the PKK is banned and Ankara like the United States and the European Union (EU) regard it as a terrorist organisation. Another reason too why the bitter PKK-Turkish battle receives little attention is the widespread crackdown on access to the embattled regions of south eastern Turkey by the government in Ankara.

Foreign and local journalists alike face punitive measures from the Turkish authorities for reporting from the urban battlefields there, including deportation and prison sentences.

While this limited independent reporting access to the conflict is comparatively recent, the PKK’s fight with Turkey is nothing new.

With its Marxist-Leninist roots the PKK has been a thorn in the side of Turkey since it was formed in the late 1970’s and especially after launching its armed struggle against the Turkish government in 1984, when it called for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey.

During the 1990’s the PKK rolled back these independence demands indicating that it might be prepared to settle for greater autonomy for the Kurds. But then came the arrest of its charismatic leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 who was subsequently jailed for treason.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse after a two-year-old Turkey-PKK ceasefire broke down in July last year.

While rarely making world headlines the PKK’s war with Turkey has taken a terrible toll over the decades. It’s estimated that more than 40,000 people have died and thousands of villages destroyed in the largely Kurdish south east of Turkey. Many Kurds from the region have had no option but to flee, settling in other parts of Turkey or further afield as the Turkish army imposes curfews.

Since the collapse of the ceasefire last July the PKK has resumed its insurgency, making its way down from its mountain strongholds to reinforce its presence in many predominately Kurdish towns and cities like Jazira, Silopi, Nusaydin, Cizre and Diyarbakir.

Fighting in these places has often been intense, the few pictures emerging that make television news bulletins showing scenes of destruction more reminiscent of Syria’s urban battlefields like Aleppo and Homs.

Not everyone is convinced that the PKK’s shift in strategy of swapping guerrilla campaigns launched from Qandil’s mountains and caves for the ditches and backstreet urban warfare of the cities was a smart move.

Some analysts believe that the PKK’s Qandil leadership based its strategy on flawed intelligence indicating that levels of support for the PKK in Kurdish town and cities would make a popular uprising inevitable.

In the wake of the fierce fighting and the toll on the civilian population some senior PKK commanders themselves subsequently questioned the tactical effectiveness of the campaign.

“The war shouldn’t have taken place in the cities,” PKK military leader Murat Qereyallan was quoted as saying in the movement’s official media outlets.

Even one of the PKK’s senior commanders and architects of the campaign, Duran Kalkan, was quick to acknowledge the terrible price the civilian population paid in the fierce backlash by the Turkish government and military response he called “the army’s unpredictable cruelty.”

“We thought they were humans even if they were our enemies. But we were wrong and made mistakes. We never expected them to attack so indiscriminately, there are simply too many casualties,” Kalkan told PKK media in late February.

For his part Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was adamant as to what his government’s no quarter response would be.

“You [the PKK] will be annihilated in those houses, those buildings, those ditches which you have dug,” Erdogan said last December, speaking to a crowd of his supporters in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Erdogan was not bluffing. The full might of the Turkish armed forces was brought to bear from airstrikes to deploying tanks in built up urban areas. That the PKK had in some instances as much as 90 per cent support from the Kurdish civilian population in many of these town and cities is without doubt. For precisely that reason those same Kurdish civilians bore the brunt of the Turkish military onslaught.

Turkey’s own human rights groups described the army’s operations against the PKK as “the bloodiest of the three-decade long conflict”.

In its latest submission to the United Nations Committee Against Torture on Turkey, Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlighted a number of serious allegations since the summer of last year when the Turkey-PKK ceasefire collapsed.

It included ‘violations of the right to life and mass displacement of residents in eight south-eastern towns where the security forces and PKK-affiliated youth groups have engaged in armed clashes.’

In addition HRW said there had been a denial of access to basic services including healthcare, food and education for residents placed under blanket curfew conditions for extended periods and in some cases months at a time.

In defence of the PKK’s strategy some regional analysts say that while the guerrilla group’s decision to dig the ditches and wait for an uprising was the wrong policy to pursue, most likely Ankara would have continued attacking the PKK even if they didn’t have the ditches.

On RUDAW the Kurdish online news portal, Hussein Turhanli, a former PKK member, was quoted as saying he believes that Ankara’s willingness to fully pursue a war against the PKK shouldn’t be underestimated.

Turhanli also insists it is wrong to say the PKK relied on flawed intelligence from Kurdish cities in their decision to mobilise for urban warfare.

“PKK would never start an operation only based on intelligence reports,” Turhanli said. “Such reports only determine the timing of the operation if the PKK has a plan for the operation.”

Instead Turhanli believes the escalation had as much to do with helping shift the pressure and military dynamics on the ground over the fate of the Kurdish enclave in Syria, Rojava, where both Erdogan and the PKK also have much at stake and whose future is uncertain.

It should be remembered that Turkey has long insisted that Syria’s Kurds pose a greater threat to its security than Islamic State. Also that the main Syrian Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), was set up as a franchise of the PKK.

Right now both Turks and Kurds blame each other for the bloody stalemate that now prevails. There is of course much blame to go round going back some time. Before his last election Erdogan clearly saw electoral advantages in the violence once it broke out. For its part, the PKK leadership appeared to have difficulty countenancing the idea that Turkey’s legal Kurdish-based political group, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), might surpass them in influence and importance.

The PKK too is having difficulty with some of the younger splinter groups within the ranks of those Kurds taking the fight to Turkey.

A few months ago a little-known militia called the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks, or TAK, took credit for a bloody car bombing in Ankara that left at least 28 dead.

Erdogan instantly tried to tie the group to the PKK, but TAK maintained it has severed ties with the PKK.

Bulent Aliriza, a Turkey expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that few had heard of TAK before December 2015. This however did not stop some intelligence analysts from insisting that TAK and the PKK are separate in name only, and that while nebulous and without its own leadership, TAK takes its cues from the PKK. This also is how Erdogan sees the links between Kurdish groups in Turkey and Syria.

The Turkish government continually insists its fight against the PKK at home is directly connected to the war in Syria.

It says it has discovered secret tunnels dug from the Syrian side of the border to the besieged Turkish town of Cizre, scene of some of the worst human rights abuses by the Turkish authorities recently.

Turkey alleges the tunnels are being used to smuggle arms between Syrian Kurdish fighters and the PKK. One young Kurdish fighter was subsequently quoted by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine confirming that such tunnels exist.

What is now clear is that the longer the conflict between Turkey and PKK continues, the more alienated and radicalised Turkey’s Kurds are likely to become.

Already for many, the borders separating them from their Syrian cousins have effectively gone. Many young Kurdish fighters who honed their urban warfare skills against the Islamic State in Syria are now using them today against security forces in Turkey.

Bitter and protracted as the stand off between Turkey and the PKK has been over many years, rarely has it been worse than now.

Just last week Erdogan once again reiterated his belief that the only solution to current problems in Turkey is to destroy the PKK.

“If you are looking for a resolution, here is the resolution. When we root out the terror organisation, without its smallest trace remaining, from these territories, then we will have put the resolution into practice,” Erdogan told reporters.

Back in the mountains of Qandil meanwhile, PKK leader Cemil Bayik was laying down his own line to journalists.

“So long as this is the Turkish approach of course the PKK will escalate the war,” Bayik promised. If there was any hint of conciliation in his remarks it was the declaration that the PKK does not want to divide Turkey.

“We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely, the struggle will continue until the Kurds' innate rights are accepted."

Yesterday it was business as usual in this no quarter war of attrition as the Turkish air force carried out air strikes in rural parts of south-eastern Turkey and bombed bases used by PKK for food and weapons support in the Qandil mountains.

Kurds are fond of using their old expression that they “have no friends but the mountains.”

These days given the widespread support from Washington and Europe for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Kurdish peshmerga forces there taking the fight to the jihadists of IS that expression has a slightly hollow ring.

For the banished and bombed PKK however, it still rings true.