Transecting Securityscapes by Till F. Paasche;James Derrick Sidaway;

Author:Till F. Paasche;James Derrick Sidaway;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

To the Qandil Mountains: Transect 2

While Western media discussions of territory in Iraqi Kurdistan have tended to focus on the disputed territories and the ideological-territorial project associated with the declaration of a caliphate straddling the borders of Iraq and Syria, the case of Qandil shows that the idea of Kurdistan’s “undisputed territories” does not really hold what it promises. The situation on the ground in Qandil is more complex than the language of statehood, monopoly of violence, and boundaries may readily encompass. Despite three decades of intense violent conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state (claiming about forty thousand lives), analytical literature on the PKK’s ideological evolution remains relatively small.10

There are few accounts of the PKK’s base in the Qandil Mountains that straddle the borders of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The discourse about Qandil, however, includes the realization that the PKK cannot straightforwardly be beaten by military means, Turkey’s large standing army notwithstanding (Bacik and Coskun 2011; Bengio 2011; Larrabee 2013). The PKK began retreating into Iraqi territory from the outset of its armed struggle in the 1980s. While the Ba‘athist state was acutely hostile, Saddam Hussein’s regime was preoccupied by the conflict with Iran and the Iraqi Kurds. The KDP and the PUK both operated farther south and thus produced a buffer between the PKK and Saddam’s forces. At the same time, the terrain was ideal for a guerrilla force, and a zone emerged that was controlled by the KDP and, around Qandil, increasingly by the PKK. The foundation for this arrangement was a deal struck in the 1980s between PKK and KDP leaders Abdullah Öcalan and Masoud Barzani, giving the PKK the right to use what was then KDP-controlled territory along the Iraqi-Turkish border to set up camps and launch operations inside Turkey. Without this, the PKK would have had to operate in hostile territory from the outset. Although the Turkish military soon started attacking the PKK camps in northern Iraq, it could not wage anti-guerrilla warfare there as effectively as it could within Turkey and was limited to aerial bombing, occasionally supported by ground troops.

Responding to Turkey’s objective to decimate the PKK and Baghdad’s lack of control, Ankara and Baghdad negotiated a deal in 1984 permitting Turkish forces to enter Iraqi territory as far as five kilometers inside the border. Marcus (2007) suggests that one of the reasons for Baghdad to agree to this was the hope that Turkish forces would also hit KDP camps. When this occurred, relations between the PKK and KDP were strained, but the PKK was soon entrenched around Qandil and could neither be eliminated by the Turkish or Iraqi armies nor expelled by the Peshmerga. The PKK’s expulsion from bases in Syria in 1998 both fostered ideological innovation and reinforced the value of its Qandil base (Paasche 2015). When U.S. forces arrived in northern Iraq in 2003, they too did not seek to occupy this area, although they did establish checkpoints on the roads leading to it (Brandon 2006).

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