{"id":58022,"date":"2012-10-26T09:53:28","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T06:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=58022"},"modified":"2023-04-03T14:15:47","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T11:15:47","slug":"inside-turkeys-kurdish-insurgency-no-sex-no-swearing-no-quran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2012\/10\/26\/inside-turkeys-kurdish-insurgency-no-sex-no-swearing-no-quran\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Turkey\u2019s Kurdish insurgency: No sex, no swearing, no Quran"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Roy Gutman<\/h4>\n

McClatchy Newspapers<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
\n

ISTANBUL — Volunteers who join the Kurdish insurgency against Turkey must abandon Islamic religious practice and must forego \u201cemotional ties\u201d to anyone outside the group, as well as swear words and sex, or face trial and prison, according to a Syrian-born Kurd who defected from the group to Turkey over the summer.<\/p>\n

The 21-year-old defector, who surrendered in June, brought with him not only a tale of life inside the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, known by its Kurdish initials as the PKK, but also detailed information about a planned attack inside Turkey that helped Turkish authorities beat back the PKK offensive.<\/p>\n

McClatchy obtained a copy of a 19-page Turkish-language account of his debriefing, which was dated July 4 and was not marked classified. The debriefing contained his name, but McClatchy is identifying him only by his initials, R.S., to protect family members who might still be in territory held by the PKK\u2019s Syrian affiliate.<\/p>\n

The PKK has been waging a war against Turkey for three decades, demanding the creation of a Kurdish state in southern Turkey. Thousands of Turks have been killed by PKK actions, and the United States and the European Union have branded it a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n

The defector\u2019s disclosures helped avert the PKK capture of Semdinli, a mainly Kurdish town of 19,000 in southeast Turkey, officials there said in August. The PKK was routed instead, losing more than 100 fighters. But the PKK offensive continues, with at least 112 Turks and 325 separatists killed between July and mid-October, and casualties mounting daily on both sides.<\/p>\n

The defector revealed that 250 to 300 insurgents were being mustered to attack Semdinli, the weapons they carried, where landmines would be planted and even the tactics for evading surveillance by Israeli-manufactured Heron drones.<\/p>\n

He also disclosed a fact of strategic significance: Part of the staging for the Semdinli operation took place at Sehidan, a PKK base inside Iran, where he had also been stationed, a sign of a tacit, though possibly passive, role by Iran in the PKK\u2019s assault against Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause Turkish planes and artillery cannot strike Iranian soil, the (PKK) organization moves freely on Iranian soil,\u201d R.S. told Turkish authorities. \u201cWe do not interfere in Iran, and they do not attempt to provide enforcement against us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kurds also inhabit portions of Iraq, where they\u2019ve established an autonomous regional government in three provinces that operates largely independently of the central government in Baghdad; and portions of Syria, where a PKK affiliate now controls much of northeast Syria with the apparent acquiescence of the besieged government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.<\/p>\n

R.S. portrayed the PKK as anti-Islamic. Performing daily prayers, fasting and reading the Quran are among the offenses that could land a recruit in prison, he told Turkish authorities. Instead, fighters were told that the religion of Kurds is Zoroastrianism, one of the world\u2019s most ancient religions, and they should worship fire. There are said to be fewer than 200,000 Zoroastrians today, mostly in Iran and India.<\/p>\n

Other offenses that could land a recruit in jail were forging an emotional relationship outside the organization, sexual relations, carrying an electronic device or disobeying orders. PKK members held for spying or sexual relations \u201care tortured in prison,\u201d and those who sold weapons or have spied \u201care sentenced to death . . . by firing squad.\u201d Civilians who disobey PKK orders are kidnapped and detained in prison, then either executed or released after payment of a fine, he said.<\/p>\n

The defector also provided Turkish authorities the noms de guerre, hometowns and deployments of more than 100 PKK recruits and officers he\u2019d trained with. They included 74 Kurds from Turkey, 13 from Syria, five from Iran, two from Iraq and a scattering from as far afield as Kyrgyzstan.<\/p>\n

PKK recruitment of Syrian Kurds had risen dramatically by late 2011 as that country\u2019s civil war intensified, and they were the largest source of new blood in the PKK, outnumbering Turkish Kurds more than 2-to-1, R.S. said.<\/p>\n

R.S. indicated he was unhappy with the apparent cooperation between the PKK, its Syrian affiliate, the People\u2019s Council of Syrian Kurdistan, and the Assad government in Damascus. \u201cThe oppression Kurds experienced in Syria for years is clear to see,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, the PKK is not carrying out any attacks against the Syrian government in the face of this oppression.\u201d If Syria\u2019s Kurds \u201cstand up to the Bashar Assad regime instead of submitting, the Assad regime cannot survive,\u201d he told his interrogators.<\/p>\n

He contrasted the PKK\u2019s view of Assad with its assault on Turkey. In comments that could be seen as self-serving for a newly arrived defector, he said the PKK \u201cignores the rights accorded to the Kurdish people by the Turkish state and carried out all its attacks against Turkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the PKK\u2019s biggest worries, R.S. said, is the unmanned Heron drones that Turkey deploys to spot insurgents, using cameras by day and thermal monitors by night, he said.<\/p>\n

On the eve of the offensive, the organization banned the use of radios, to prevent the drones from tracking their movements, and all communications were to be written on notepaper and encoded. Standard issue for fighters included lined umbrellas that enable insurgents \u201cto move freely without being detected by drones and military positions.\u201d The PKK also distributed raincoats, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cRaincoats stop thermal cameras from detecting body heat so long as they are kept dry . . . and at least two inches from the body,\u201d R.S. said. At the first sound of a drone, \u201cwe run to shelters. Those who are outside hide motionless under a rock or tree.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were other revelations: the PKK since 2006 has maintained an \u201cImmortals Battalion\u201d of about 200 within its special forces whose mission is to carry out \u201csensational attacks in city centers during critical periods\u201d to create fear and \u201cdiminish the citizens\u2019 trust in the state.\u201d Its members are \u201cunwell,\u201d are trained \u201cconstantly\u201d in ideology and explosives, and are told they should sacrifice themselves for Kurdistan. \u201cI know they say that when the time comes, they would blow themselves up,\u201d R.S. said.<\/p>\n

Like many recruits, R.S. joined the PKK in part to get away from family problems \u2013 some analysts say this is the primary reason young men, and women, take to the hills. He signed up in Damascus in the summer of 2010, and after a week of indoctrination, returned to his hometown in northeastern Syria for one night. Along with two couriers, he boarded a raft on the Tigris River and traveled to Iraq.<\/p>\n

The first major formation he encountered was a female brigade consisting of 40 to 45 women, but then he was taken to a new recruit training center in the Gare district of Iraqi Kurdistan. After training in three locations for about a year, he was stationed in Sehidan in northern Iran.<\/p>\n

R.S. did not say exactly what led him to defect, but it may have been partly personal. During training, he had befriended a young Turkish Kurd, who also had joined in mid-2010, but commanders would not allow them to be deployed together. The two young men had been deployed to Sehidan in May and were on guard duty when they decided to leave.<\/p>\n

Fully aware that a major attack was being prepared on the town of Semdinli, they walked for three days and arrived on the outskirts of the town. There, they expected police or soldiers to capture them, \u201chowever we encountered no police or soldiers at this time.\u201d So they walked to the headquarters of the military police and surrendered.<\/p>\n

Under Turkey\u2019s \u201claw of effective remorse,\u201d defectors who have not committed acts of violence will not be charged with membership in a terrorist organization. If they committed violent acts, the sentence can be reduced by as much as three-quarters. Just what happened to R.S. is not known.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\nRead more here: <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Roy Gutman McClatchy Newspapers ISTANBUL — Volunteers who join the Kurdish insurgency against Turkey must abandon Islamic religious practice and must forego \u201cemotional ties\u201d to anyone outside the group, as well as swear words and sex, or face trial and prison, according to a Syrian-born Kurd who defected from the group to Turkey over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":69952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1280],"class_list":["post-58022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-pkk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}