Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

THE WAU. STREET JOURNAL, TllURSVAY, AUGUST 28; 1988
t _•. __. .
·Kurdish Guerrillas Continue Their Pressurë.
By RoBERT D. KAPLAN
SARDASHT, Iran - While Iranian and
Iraqi artillery. units exchange fire from
mountaintop outposts in the extreme north
of their 130-mile war front, the tortuous
defiles between the two armies are in the
hands of Kurdish guerrillas who owe allegiance
to neither side. Besides controlling
the no man's land in the war zone, the Kurds
have a stranglehold on territory deep inside
both Iran and Iraq. Armed with only
Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled
grenades, they are doing more than any
outside power to undermine the stability of
two murderous regimes. And if the war
were to end tomorrow, the Kurds. would be
the only force capable of keeping both
regimes in a state of continued turmoil.
The guerrillas, known in their own
Indo-European tongue as pesh mergas
("those who walk before death"), are able
to penetrate 100 miles into Iran, and have
put Sardasht and many other towns in the
west of the country under siege. Though
Massoud Rajavi's mujahfdin has gotten
most of the publicity for resisting Ayatollah
KMmeini, it is a Kurdish organization, the
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, known
as the KDPI and headed by Dr. Abdel
Rahman Qasemlu, which is now mounting
the strongest armed resistance to Tehran.
Dr. Qasemlu's 10,000 pesh mergas have
kllled several times that number of Iranian
soldiers and revolutionary guards since
~meini came to power in 1979.
Fri1g1le Underpinnings
Iraq, meanwhile, is even more threatened
by the Kurds. Uprisings by Masud
~arzani's Kurdish Democratic Party and
Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
make it impossible for the Iraqi army to
travel through much of northern Iraq except
in convoy, and have necessitated the use of
the Iraqi air force against not only the
Iranians but the Kurds as well. At times, the
Baghdad regime of Saddam Hussein At-
Tikriti has been so hard pressed by the
Kurds that it has relied on the Turkish
military for patrolling parts of northern
Iraq .• The mid-August Turkish air strike
against Kurdish rebels inside Iraq who have
been active against Turkey is as much an
indication of Turkish strength as it is of
Iraqi weakness. . .
Neither Iraq nor Iran is about to be
overrun by pesh mergas. But the story of
the Kurds illustrates the fragile political
underpinnings of these two ethnically-fractured
states locked in a six-year-old war
with each other.
A Sunni Moslem people who speak a
language akin to Persian, the Kurds have
lived for millenia in the Zagros and Taurus
mountains that divide the deserts of the
Middle East from the steppes of central
Asia. A more strategically interesting bit of
territory would be hard to imagine. The land
between the southernmost Red Army units
and the northernmost of the great Arabian
011 fields is almost entirely populated by
Kurds.
There are 16 mlllion of them spread out
over Iran, Iraq. Syria, Turkey and the
Soviet Union. Half live in eastern Turkey,
where a colonial-like polley of repression
emanating from a strong central government
in Ankara, since the time of Ataturk,
has kept the Kurds from being a destabiliz- .
ing force.
Such was also the case in Iran unW the
overthrow of the Shah. Though the. Shiite
clergy may be consolidating their hold in the
Farsi heartland, the border regions of Iran,
particularly Kurdistan and Baluchistan,
have been simmering with revolt for over
seven ye~. Ethnic minorities account for
half of Iran's population of 44 million. And
many of these Moslem groups, like the
Kurds, are Deither religious in outlook nor
Shiite in faith. To them, Shiite fundamentalism
is merely the whip hand of Farsi
imperialism, DOmore.
Soaring inflation has IDcreased anti-regime
sentiments. In Sardùht and nearby
Mahabad, the price of kerosene has reportedlf
risen seven times in one year. Bread
has gone up 10 times, and the price of a
simple pen 18 times in the same period.
Sporadic street battles are said to have
taken place between groups of Kurds and
I
If the Iran-Iraq war were to end tomorrow, the KurdS .
would be the only force capable of keeping both regimes in a
state of continued tumwil.
revolutionary guards, or pasdaran, who are
usually of Farsi descent. "The price of
everything in Iran has gone up except the
price of human beings," said Salam Azztzi,
head of the KDPl's political committee in
Sardasht.
The KDPl's presence in western Iran
consists of guerrilla bases built into ~iff
sides, from where raidIRr partiès. âre sent
out to attack Iranian positions. Towns like
Sardasht are filled with pasdaran by day
and with pesh mergas bY night. Captured
Iranian soldiers and revolutionary guards
told me that they were sent out to western
Iran with the mistaken belief that they
would be fighting Iraqis, not Kulds. In fact,
many of the estimated 200.000 Iranian
troo~ in the region are pinDed down
fighting this "other" war.
For this ba,dly needed diversion, Iraq has
provided diplomatic and logistical support
to the KDPI. But the base inside Iraq from
where the KDPI directs all ill Iranian
operations is not the Iraqis to provide, since
the Iraqis don't even control this area within
their own country. Jalal Talabani does. And
since bis Kurdish group __at war with Iraq.
the KDPI has had to make separate deals
with both sides in yet uotl1er of tlese
"other" wars being waged in the shadows of
the greater Iraq-Iran conßict.
The ipcred1bly complex military situation
in northern Iraq, in which each valley in
some areas seems to be held by a different
Kurdish group (besides the main ones, there
are smaller outfits as well) ,ilsymptomatic
of a more fundamental ailment: the totally
artificial nature of the Iraqi state. .
The word Iraq in Arabic means "well
rooted." Ironically, Iraq is anything b~!
that. TIle country was created tbro1Jlb an ad
hoc process in the aftermath of World War 1.
In 1925, &be oil-rich Turkish prOvince of
Mosul was attached to Britisb Mesopotamla
almost as an afterthought. The result was à
country with a volaWe KurdJab minor1ty ~
the north, making up nearly 20% öf
the population, and an Arab majority split
between Sunnis and Shiites whose only real
allegiance was to. the Arab worId at
large. .
Successive Iraqi governments have compensated
for these deficiencies by a policyofextreme
repression. KurdJab villages hav~
been razed, their drinking wells cemented
over, and the men taken away from their
famWes never to be seen again. While ip
central Mesopotamia, the most overbearing
and efficient security apparatus in the
Moslem Middle East has been put in.place.
Iraq is even more controlled and represseö
a country than even Syria. A Western
diplomat ,in Baghdad described Iraqis If
"the most cowed people in ~ Arap
world." . [
Hysterical Nationalism ...
The bloody styl~ of President Hussein'.
rule inside Iraq has been lately obscured by
bis more moderate policies outside. For
these policies, such as bis alliance with
Jordan and EtYPt against Syria, the civilized
",orId has only the war to thank. If the
war were to end, Iraq would likely revert to
the h~terical Arab nationalism of its past.
The relatively liberalized, Western outlook
of the government officials in Jordan and
Egypt is alien to Iraq. Though war has.
necessitated a change in tactics, political
conure in Baghdad is the same as alwa~.
. .
If the war were to end, the prognosis
regarding Iran is even more chilling:
imagine the level of Iran's terrorist activities
if it didn't have a war to wage.
The Kurds have the most to worry about.
. The war's end would enable both countries
to launch an all-out offensive against them.
Building up the Kurds now would help
guarantee that even if a cease-fire is called,
Iraq and Iran are kept stewing in theil1 own
pefV1!rse juices. Helping the KDPI, i{1
partitular, is a way of hurting the mullahs
without having to aid Iraq's almost equally
unsavory rulers.
Mr. K&plan is the Athens-based corre.
spondent lor the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and ABC Radio News.
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