Shouts of Fire, No Smoke, Many Mirrors on the Kurdistan Frontier

It's hard hiding a war, or, despite the lessons bestowed by the how-to movie Wag the Dog, pretending to have one, but something like one or the other seems to have happened on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan this month.

Abid Mustafa's essay [1] for Global Research provides background on Turkish political mechanics, and it helps make sense of the timing of the Turkish military build-up--hard to hide that--on the frontier, the U.S. Armenian Genocide Bill, may it again rest in peace a good long while, and even, possibly, the latest in Kurdish obfuscation: what is going on Out There, this 7th day of December, Google has yet to tell.

Although such as Reuters may note, "The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK or Kongra-Gel), founded in 1978 as a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group, has been fighting for an independent Kurdish state," a cursory look at the PKK paints the picture of the romantic freedom fighter with varying levels of cause, or none, as member and leadership rolls churn with time and original fervor drifts around a multipurposed alternative idealism.

Somewhere, on the backside of a mountain, figuratively, or scattered through the social weave of tens of thousands of Kurds, there are approximately 3,000 PKK rebels (literally, and whose names the governments purport to know), and how an army, any army, may fight them except by killing any and all around them, one might wish to know. 

"The Turkish military said Saturday that it had inflicted "significant losses" on a group of Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq, though it offered no evidence for its claim," reported The New York Times earlier this week.[3]

Well, where are the bodies?

Then, presuming the cold earth has preserved those bodies or fire not eaten their bones, where might be the authentication as PKK?

Try this for Orwellian gymnastics: after reporting that spokesmen for the PKK, also the Kurdish Democratic Party, and the "commander of Iraqi border protection forces in Dohuk Province" denied that attacks had taken place or that Turkish special forces had crossed the frontier, the clip goes right on with, "The operation occurred a day after the Turkish cabinet granted final permisson to the military to make a cross-border strike." [3]

The mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan may be less developed by industrial standards, but one may suppose, or hope, the area hasn't been isolated from the Internet by the local equivalent of a Burmese military junta.

Perhaps I read too closely, but the end of the NYT article notes the positions of the journalists reporting the story: Sabrina Tavernise--Istanbul; Stephen Farrell--Baghdad; Khalid al-Ansary--Baghdad; and "Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Sulaimaniya and Diyala."

One cannot fault journalists or the organizations that support their work of reporting from the edges in any of the Islam Small Wars and hot zones--for that, you may well fault me, and I would have to accept the criticism--but one may appeal to warrior authorities of all stripe to leave journalists to their jobs or, really, reconsider the sensibility of their own agendas.

In the meantime, there's got to be someone on the frontier with a satellite uplink to the web: pray we hear from that party.

Reference:

1. Mustafa, Abid.  "Turkey's military operation in Iraq: Limited incursion or full scale invasion?"  Global Research, December 2, 2007.

2. "FACTBOX-Turksih incursions into Northern Iraq."  Reuters AlertNet, December 1, 2007.

3. Tavernise, Sabrina and Stephen Farrell.  "Turkey Says It Attacked Kurdish Fighters in Iraq."  The New York Times, December 2, 2007.