October 23, 2007

The women rebels who are ready to fight and die for the Kurdish cause

 

Deborah Haynes in the Qandil Mountains

 

Read Deborah Haynes's Inside Iraq blog

The Kurdish fighter tied back her hair in a scarf and hoisted a rifle over one shoulder before darting farther up the rugged mountain to escape the threat of a possible airstrike.

“Get as far away from the camp as you can,” a second rebel told The Times, pointing to a steep slope and indicating the fastest way down.

A third added: “We are seen as a terrorist group, so what do you expect?”

The alarm was raised during a weekend visit to a small camp for women rebels in the Qandil Mountains, which straddle the border between the Kurdish north of Iraq and southern Turkey.

The women are mostly former Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters who say that they now pursue more of an educational and co-ordinating role in support of Kurdish women’s rights. Airstrikes have become a regular hazard as tensions rise between their outlawed organisation and the Turkish Government.

Women play a crucial role in the PKK, which has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for three decades in a campaign that has cost more than 30,000 lives.

In the latest bloodshed, an ambush on Sunday left at least 12 Turkish soldiers dead and 16 wounded, increasing tensions at the border where Turkish forces are massing.

Treated as equals by their male counterparts on the battlefield as well as in the political arena, women fighters are trained to use Kalashnikovs, grenades and other weapons before being dispatched in mixed and single-sex units.

The best women fighters are also able to climb up the ranks to positions of command, with the “self-defence” armed wing of the PKK operating an obligatory 40 per cent female quota.

“If a Turkish soldier comes and wants to kill me, then I shoot him back,” said a woman called Surbuz, who joined the PKK in 1993.

“That is the mechanism of war. It becomes a part of everyday life,” the 32-year-old said, dressed in baggy, dull-green trousers and a shirt with a woollen jumper over the top.

At first the Turkish Army did not take the women rebels, who have been part of the PKK’s armed struggle since it was begun in 1984, seriously.

“Then they realised that the women are as tough if not tougher than the men,” said Ms Surbuz, an attractive woman with short, bobbed, brown hair.

“After this the soldiers stopped distinguishing between the male and the female fighters. I think they are now more afraid of the women because the women are more disciplined and they will never surrender.”

“We will either kill or be killed,” she added. “For me it is freedom, success or death. It is simple.”

Pictures of women who have been killed or taken their own lives dotted the walls of three rooms inside makeshift huts where members of the group live and operate.

As well as being willing to die for their cause, the women in the PKK avoid sexual relationships, feeling that having sex with a man, even a fellow fighter, undermines their goals. “If you could create a society of feminist men then that would be okay,” Zilar Sterk, a second Kurdish rebel, said.

Ms Surbuz and Ms Sterk, along with about 20 other women at the Qandil mountain base, belong to an umbrella female organisation known as the High Commune of Women (KJB).

This group helps to co-ordinate the work of three wings: an ideological branch that offers education on the rights of women; a practical unit that addresses problems of inequality in society, and a section that oversees the female military role within the PKK.

“There is a lot of pressure in Middle Eastern society, in Kurdistan especially, on women from the father, the mother and the brothers,” said Ms Surbuz, who is a member of the KJB co-ordinating committee. “Mothers and sisters, they are made to live in the man’s house. I do not want to be like that.”

Ms Sterk, 34, a member of the commune’s management committee and the only woman on the base without experience as a fighter, said that she was imprisoned for four years because the Turkish authorities wrongly suspected her of being a member of the PKK. She was never prosecuted.

“After my release I joined up,” she said, noting that she wanted to help women to maximise their potential, as well as fight for the rights for Kurds in general.

“A woman should be able to share her power and trust herself to have the strength to do whatever she wants,” said Ms Sterk, who used to work at a state-run orphanage in Turkey while studying at university.

Scattering up the mountain face after the airstrike warning — the threat later turned out to be of a possible shelling from Iran, which is also fighting Kurdish rebels — the women left all belongings behind apart from their weapons.

“This is how we live,” Ms Sterk said as she apologetically ushered The Times away from the camp. “I must go to a safer place, but I am not scared.”