BAGHDAD, Oct. 18 — Turkey’s decision to allow the dispatch of troops over Iraq’s border in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas throws into relief a troubling quandary for Iraq’s leaders.
On one hand, Iraq wants a cordial relationship with Turkey, a powerhouse in the region and a counterweight to the competing pulls of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
But Iraq has been able to do little to halt the rebel group’s activities because Iraq’s central government must rely on its ethnic Kurdish minority, which populates the region where the guerrillas are active, to take a stand against them.
Another factor complicating matters for the Iraqi government is that the Qandil mountains of the border region with Turkey are among the most rugged areas in the Middle East, and the area has never been fully under any government control.
Iraq’s Kurdish region has been semi-autonomous since 1991 and controls its own armed forces, which also patrol the border with Turkey. All ethnic Kurds, they are reluctant to fight the rebels because it means fighting brother Kurds, with whom they are generally sympathetic.
The guerrillas are ethnic Kurds who come primarily from Turkey and speak Turkish. The rebel group, known by its Turkish initials P.K.K., has an estimated 3,000 fighters in the mountains of northwest Iraq, from which they carry out attacks on Turkey. In the past, the rebel group has aspired to have an autonomous state in Turkey, though it is unclear exactly what the group’s demands are now.
While the Kurds in northern Iraq are not thought to participate in the activities of the Turkish rebel group, neither have they sought vigorously to eradicate the rebels — in part because it would be tantamount to going after their own. “The P.K.K. members are Kurds just as we are,” said Rebwar Karem, 31, a student at Sulaimaniya University on Thursday. “The state of Turkey hates the Kurds so while we don’t respect the armed struggle of the Kurds in Turkey, I’m against anyone who orders them to leave” the Kurdish area of Iraq.
At a protest on Thursday in Erbil, marchers carried signs that swore allegiance to Kurds, wherever they might be in the region. “Kurdistan is one and all Kurds are pesh merga,” said one sign, a reference to Kurdish fighters.
In a statement on Wednesday the Kurdistan Regional Government affirmed its opposition to the rebel group’s violent acts but warned Turkey not to tell the Kurds how to run their affairs. “We do not interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey, and we expect the same in return,” it said. The regional government “condemns the killing of innocent people in Turkey and does not believe that violence solves any problem,” the statement said.
Western officials say that neither Iraq’s Kurds nor the central government has much of an incentive to act vigorously against the guerrillas. “The Iraqi government would like P.K.K. to go away, but when you’re in Baghdad, that stuff seems very far away,” said an American official who is familiar with the region, but who refused to be quoted by name because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. “As for the Kurdistan Regional Government, I don’t get any sense of fondness in domestic Kurdish politics for the P.K.K., but the idea of taking action against fellow Kurds is anathema.”
The official added that the Kurdistan Regional Government looked at the situation pragmatically. The Iraqi Kurds have other concerns, like attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents, especially in places like the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where there is a struggle for control. “The P.K.K. isn’t the first thing that come to their mind. It’s the bombings in Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk and their argument is, ‘Yes the P.K.K. is killing Turks, but are they an existential threat to Turkey? No. Are they going to bring down the Turkish government? No.’”
None of that, however, is much comfort to the Turks. Several thousand have died since the early 1980s when the rebel group was formed. The latest rebel attack in Turkey on Oct. 7 killed 13 Turkish soldiers. A measure of Kurdish reluctance in northern Iraq to judge fellow Kurds is that several Kurds explained in interviews that killing Turkish soldiers was a defensible action.
“The P.K.K. is killing Turkish soldiers in Kurdish villages,” said an Iraqi official who is an ethnic Kurd and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was expressing a personal opinion. “I hate to imagine what Turkish soldiers would do in a Kurdish village,” he said, adding, “Many Kurds would see that as an act of self-defense.”
The official Iraqi position is far more modulated. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has called for talks with Turkey, and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi traveled to Istanbul on Wednesday to extend an olive branch to the Turks. In an interview broadcast on several Iraqi television stations late on Thursday, the country’s foreign minister, who happens to be a Kurd, used carefully diplomatic language. “The P.K.K. should leave Iraq,” said Hoshyar Zebari in a brief interview, but added, “The Iraqi government is uncomfortable with the decision of the Turkish government to send troops to northern Iraq.”
Mr. Zebari, like many Iraqi Kurds, finds himself with divided loyalties. While the Kurds of northern Iraq have thrown in their lot with the country’s central government and say they want to be part of a united Iraqi state, their loyalty to fellow Kurds runs deep — and not without reason. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, an estimated 500,000 Kurds fled over the border to Turkey (a similar number fled to Iran) and found refuge among Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
Hundreds of years of history further bolsters the Iraqi Kurds’ position. The Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East and its members now live primarily in Iraq, Turkey and Iran, with a small number in Syria. Primarily mountain dwellers, they have their own language, customs, music and native dress. Despite their numbers, they have never had their own country and that reality irks many Kurds to this day, especially in the Kurdish area of Iraq.
Reporting was contributed by Sabrina Tavernise in Amman, Jordan, Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Richard A. Oppel Jr. in Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times in Kurdistan.