05 May 2006

Kurdish Infighting Over Possible Eruption in Northern Iraq

As the temperature rises in Northern Iraq, conflicts have started to emerge not only between Kurds and their Turkish and Iranian neighbors, which we covered earlier in the week, but also between the Kurdish rebels - known as the PKK - and secessionist Kurds currently in Uncle Sam's puppet government.

One group at odds with the PKK is CIA-collaborator Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Middle East Online reports that one of Talabani's allies, Imad Ahmed, deputy prime minister of northern Kurdistan's Sulaimaniyah province, issued a stark warning to the PKK "amid rising tensions between Iraqi Kurds and Iran and Turkey, both of which have Kurdish minorities and have been battling separatist militants from the PKK and its offshoots."

According to the report, "On Wednesday the PKK, an armed separatist group which is fighting for an independent Kurdish homeland in the region, warned Ankara of a 'mass war' if its forces entered Iraqi territory to fight PKK guerillas."

Ahmed responded harshly to this report, asserting that "They (PKK) are in our land. We want them to respect the law and not use our territory to stage attacks" against Iran or Turkey. "We want them to leave our country but in peace, not in war," Ahmed continued, feigning ignorance of both the mass slaughter taking place throughout Iraq and the ethnic cleasing of Sunnis and Turks taking place in the province he 'governs'. "If they want to stay they have to use politics not weapons."

Throughout the 1990s, Turkey fought a war against the PKK with Uncle Sam's military aid in a campaign of mass slaughter that resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 civilians. Uncle Sam's collaborators like Talibani, well aware of this history, find themselves caught between their servility to Sam on one hand and their Kurdish blood on the other.