A Squabbling People Again Occupies the Eye of a Storm

An old Kurdish saying has it that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains.

Poor, divided and often oppressed in the three countries where they are most populous--Iraq, Iran and Turkey--these rebellious Middle Easterners are now finding that even forbidding snowcapped peaks are providing them with little protection.

Once again, the Kurds are involved in a power play that threatens to draw not only regional players but perhaps also the United States and its allies into a new military escalation and struggle for influence.

The Turkish armed forces have commandeered all spare commercial airline seats to send reinforcements to Turkey’s border with Iraq. Iranian troops are reportedly back inside Iraqi Kurdistan--part of a roughly defined area nominally controlled by the Kurds that arcs through southeast Turkey, northern Iraq and northwest Iran. And Iraqi troops on Saturday moved significantly inside Kurdish-controlled Iraqi territory for the first time in five years.

Western military strategists are facing a familiar conundrum. While they may want to head off a new conflict that could trigger renewed Kurdish refugee movements--and they certainly want to contain inimical regimes in Iraq and Iran--they may find it politically impossible to commit ground troops to defend landlocked mountain ranges that have no economic importance.

At the heart of the latest escalation lie the time-honored, short-term Kurdish imperatives of money, guns, power and factional infighting that have managed to thwart the Kurds’ few chances to unite in an independent nation.

Specifically at issue now between the squabbling Kurdish factions is border trade with Turkey that is estimated to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “taxes” collected by Kurdish militias, U.S. officials say. The isolated Kurds otherwise have limited sources of income and hard currency.

About 20 million to 25 million Kurds now live in the Middle East, often thoroughly assimilated into countries like Turkey (12 million Kurds), Iran (5.5 million), Iraq (3.5 million), Syria (1 million) and several republics of the former Soviet Union.

The Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims, speak their own form of Persian and are said to be descended from the Medes, one of the most ancient peoples of the Middle East. But their dialects differ, and the edges of mountain territory that they inhabit are ill defined.

The Kurds achieved the highest level of national development in Iraq, partly thanks to centuries of independent-minded princes during the Ottoman Empire and also, during this century, to a bloody three-decade struggle for national rights led by the Barzani tribe.

The Kurds’ Iranian-backed struggle against Saddam Hussein’s regime brought them a short-lived recognition of their administrative and cultural autonomy in 1974. But when the shah of Iran withdrew his support for the Iraqi Kurds in 1975, Hussein came down hard on them.

Hussein’s crackdown reached its peak during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, when the Iraqi Kurds were once again backed by Tehran. Hussein razed 5,000 Iraqi Kurdish villages and ordered the killing of an estimated 180,000 Iraqi Kurds, including more than 4,000 who died in a 1988 poison gas attack.

Not surprisingly, the Kurds rose up against a seemingly weakened Hussein after his defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But Iraqi tanks and helicopter gunships crushed their uprising and sent more than 1 million Iraqi Kurds fleeing across the borders of Iran and Turkey.

Pushed into action by massive media sympathy for the Kurds’ plight, the United States and its Gulf War allies, under the relief effort called “Operation Provide Comfort,” created a “safe area” in northern Iraq for the Kurds.

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Originally conceived of as little more than a flat campsite just inside the Iraqi border, the protected area soon grew to encompass the much more extensive territory under a separate “no-fly” zone north of the 36th parallel.

Free elections in May 1992 symbolized the best of what the Kurds might have achieved, perhaps even an independent Kurdish state. But they also marked the point when the Iraqi Kurdish guerrilla groups began to squabble over territory and power, a conflict that destroyed any such dream and developed into a war that killed about 2,000 people in 1994 and ’95.

The Kurds had proved themselves to be strong only when the nations around them were weak. Gradually, the divided Kurds have been forced into tactical alliances with the old enemies surrounding them: the Persians, the Arabs and the Turks.

It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that on Saturday, the grand old Barzani tribe, under the name of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, should go to war against rival Iraqi Kurds on the side of its enemies, Hussein’s Iraqi Arabs--or that those other Iraqi Kurds, the urbanized progressives of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, should be backed by the Islamic regime of Iran.

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The Kurds

There are about 20 million Kurds: up to 12 million in Turkey, 5.5 million in Iran, 3.5 million in Iraq, and others in Syria and the former Soviet Union. They share a language and are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. They are famed as fierce warriors but are plagued by tribal rivalries.

Chronology

* 1920 -- Treaty of Sevres, which carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, calls for creation of an autonomous Kurdish state. Instead, the Kurds are split up mainly between Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

* 1931 -- Ahmad Barzani, grandfather of current Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani, rebels against Iraqi government.

* 1961 -- Mustafa Barzani, Massoud Barzani’s father, launches a new round of armed resistance against Iraqi rule that continues for 14 years.

* 1988 -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launches scorched-earth campaign against Kurds. Thousands are killed in poison gas attacks, including more than 4,000 men, women and children in the town of Halabja in March.

* 1991 -- In March, shortly after Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War, Kurdish guerrillas seize several key towns in northern Iraq. Baghdad puts down the rebellion, sending some 2 million Kurds fleeing to Iran and Turkey. Thousands die of exposure in the mountains. The United States, Britain and France then establish a “safe haven” for the Kurds in northern Iraq.

* 1992 -- In May, the first elections for a Kurdish assembly leave Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in a dead heat, leading to fears of unstable leadership.

* 1994 -- The two main Kurdish factions begin battling each other, leaving some 2,000 dead before the United States mediates a cease-fire in August 1995.

* 1996 -- On Aug. 17, the main Kurdish rivals resume fighting one another. On Aug. 31, the Iraqi army sends thousands of troops into northern Iraq to fight against Talabani’s PUK in the main town of Irbil.

U.S. Commitment:

Under U.S. Resolution 688, adopted in April 1991, the United States and its allies are committed to ensuring that Hussein does not repress the Kurds and other Iraqi civilian populations. But they are not committed to preventing or stopping internal Kurdish fighting, which has gone on sporadically for years. By joining with one Kurdish faction inside Iraq to attach and apparently defeat another group of Kurds, Hussein has made the crisis appear to be an internal affair.

No Friends but the Mountains

The 74,000-square-mile area occupied by Kurds arcs through a mountainous zone from southeast Turkey through northern Iraq and into northwest Iran.