Bush & Co., Iran and the Girl Guerrillas

By Reese Erlich, Mother Jones. Posted April 19, 2007.

The green and brown scrub brush in the Qandil Mountains acquires a thick layer of snow by late fall. In happier times, these peaks at the border between Iraq and Iran would offer tourists spectacular views, but these days the only sightseers are men and women with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. They are Iranian Kurdish guerrillas based among their Kurdish brethren in northern Iraq, and at the moment, they may be the closest thing the Bush administration has to an ally in its confrontation with Tehran.

Kurdish and American sources say the United States has been supporting guerrilla raids against Iran, channeling the money through organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan; last fall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that Israel is also providing equipment and training. When I arrived in Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdish city closest to the Iranian border, it was hard to miss the Green Berets in civvies walking down the main street. "Suli is like some Balkan city years ago," one U.S. officer told me. "You've got spies everywhere. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing." The seedy Ashti Hotel looked like something out of a Graham Greene novel, its smoke-filled lobby a meeting place for obscure diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and spies. Men sat around staring at glasses of strong tea; every now and again they'd pour a bit of tea into their saucers, let it cool, and slurp it down. I met a Kurdish military adviser at the Ashti, and when the U.S. Army came to escort me for a story on its operations, Humvees pulled up by the hotel.

Getting to the actual guerrilla camps was relatively easy. Kurdish officials unconvincingly insisted they had no idea how to find the fighters, but cabdrivers had no trouble pinpointing the camps. As my four-wheel-drive vehicle climbed the mountainside, young women in green pants and the distinctive twisted Kurdish headscarf appeared along the road. They were fighters with the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or pjak, which claims its troops are almost 50 percent female.

Part underground movement, part cult, pjak requires its fighters to eschew sex and study the teachings of Abdullah Ocalan, a Nietzsche-quoting Turkish Kurd who is its spiritual leader. Ocalan's political organization, the radical Kurdistan Workers Party (pkk), is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. pjak's relationship with the party is supposed to be arm's length, but I had to pass through two pkk checkpoints on my way to the guerrillas' camp, each of them relaying information up the line via walkie-talkie. Finally, the fighters welcomed me into a room with a threadbare carpet on the floor and a kerosene stove blasting heat; posters of Ocalan hung on the wall along with the pkk flag. While waiting for their leaders to descend from the mountains, I asked one of the women what they did to stave off boredom. "We watch satellite TV," she said, insisting that they cared only for news programs before confessing, with a shy smile, "We like Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson."

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Reese Erlich's book, "The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis," will be published in October 2007. See his interviews with Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and other Iranian opposition leaders at: motherjones.com/iran_dissidents.

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