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Kurdish Enclave Fears Conflict With Turks

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By PAUL SCHEMM, The Associated Press

Published: November 15, 2007

IRBIL, Iraq - Kurdish guerrillas watch the border for any signs that Turkey's military will carry out threats to sweep across.

Other rumblings, however, are coming from inside Iraq: a new ambivalence among Iraqi Kurds about support for their rebel cousins holed up in the mountains.

The fear - expressed by Kurdish officials and on the streets - is that the showdown could threaten the relatively peaceful and prosperous enclave that Kurds have carved out since 1991 after generations of poverty and oppression.

Even a small shift in sentiment is meaningful because Kurdish separatists in Turkey - known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK - have counted on deep Kurdish nationalism for decades to protect their supply lines and hide-outs in the northern Iraq.

"It's making a lot of people nervous," Ismail Zayer, an Arab newspaper editor with long-standing ties to the Kurds, speaking of the escalating PKK-Turkey tensions.

"A lot of nationalistic Kurds have become less nationalistic," he said. "The Kurds understand that independence is not necessarily a state and a flag. Rather it is having stability and a good economy."
Kurds are a major ethnic group straddling four countries - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria - totaling about 20 million people.

Most live in Turkey, primarily in the southeast, where the PKK has been fighting for autonomy since 1984 in a conflict that has killed nearly 40,000 people.

With the rest of Iraq plagued by bombings and killings, the three northern Kurdish provinces have emerged as an oasis of calm and a magnet for foreign investment.

All that could be at risk if Turkey launches a major attack against the PKK, whose fighters launch deadly attacks against Turkish soldiers across the border.

Tuesday, Turkish helicopter gunships fired on abandoned villages thought to be used as PKK outposts.

The raid took place in Dahuk province, a booming gateway for Turkish imports.

"To be honest, the PKK is an annoying organization," said Dahuk's governor, Taher Fattah Ramadan, in his office, which is just 44 miles from the border.

Ramadan said Turks and Iraqi Kurds benefit from a bustling cross-border trade that a Turkish attack would put in peril.

"The Turkish province just over the frontier has over 180 companies and financial institutions that benefit directly from trade and investment in northern Iraq," he said.

To decrease their political isolation, the Kurds are reaching out to other countries, said Zayer, who runs his newspaper from Irbil after repeated attempts on his life in Baghdad.

As an example, the regional Ministry of Culture invited Egyptian journalists and academics to a recent conference in memory of Mohammed Ali Awni, a Turkish-born Kurd who translated books on Kurds into Arabic in the last century.

"We hope that these sorts of celebrations will help reduce the tensions in the region and allow space for discussion," regional Culture Minister Falkadin Kakei said.

Kakei also expressed his frustration with the PKK's reliance on attacks rather than on dialogue or political pressure.

"We have officially told them to lay down their arms ... and fight the cause through other means," he said.

Many Kurds still cleave to their fiercely independent ways, and note how most Arab regimes kept silent while they were being massacred by Saddam Hussein. After the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds came under the protection of U.S.-led air patrols and broke nearly all ties with Baghdad.

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