Kurds change tactics to force
talks By Gareth Jenkins
Recent attacks by the Kurdistan Workers'
Party (PKK) suggest that the organization is
adopting new battlefield tactics to increase the
psychological pressure on Turkey in the hope of
forcing Turkish authorities to enter into peace
negotiations.
Over the past few years the
PKK has pursued a two-front strategy: an urban
bombing campaign in western Turkey and a rural
insurgency in the mountainous southeast of the
country. During its first armed campaign, which
lasted from 1984 to 1999, the PKK initially sought
to control large swathes of territory in
southeast Turkey,
particularly at night.
During the early
1990s, it also staged several large-scale attacks
on military outposts. However, the practice was
abandoned after the Turkish military began to
inflict heavy casualties through the use of Cobra
attack helicopters in hot pursuit operations.
Gradually, through a combination of a scorched
earth policy, aggressive search-and-destroy
patrols and the development of a cadre of
battle-hardened non-commissioned officers, the
Turkish security forces gained the initiative.
By the time the PKK announced it was
abandoning armed struggle in 1999, it had already
effectively been defeated on the battlefield,
while political pressure had forced Syria, its
main state sponsor, to withdraw its support.
The decision to return to violence in June
2004 was taken despite the opposition of many PKK
field commanders, who argued that the organization
was too weak militarily, lacked a state sponsor
and had only about 3,500 militants under arms,
which was down from a peak of about 8,000 in the
early 1990s. When it resumed its insurgency, the
PKK tacitly acknowledged its relative weakness
through its choice of battlefield tactics.
It reduced the average size of its active
field units to about six to eight militants,
compared to 15-20 in the 1990s, and avoided direct
confrontation with the Turkish military. Although
it staged small ambushes, it concentrated
primarily on the use of mines, snipers and
long-range strafing of military outposts, after
which its units rapidly withdrew before the
Turkish military could call up land reinforcements
and air support.
The first sign of a
change came in the October 7 ambush of a Turkish
commando unit in the Gabar mountains in which 13
Turkish soldiers were killed. Not only was it the
highest Turkish death toll in more than a decade,
but the ambush appears to have been laid by 45-50
PKK militants, the largest concentration of PKK
forces in a single attack since the resumption of
the armed campaign.
At 12:20am on October
21, an estimated 150-200 militants attacked a
50-strong infantry battalion in a military outpost
close to the village of Daglica, about five
kilometers from Turkey's border with Iraq. The
attack appears to have been planned well in
advance.
Villagers reported that first
electricity and telephone lines were cut and then
the only bridge to the outpost was blown up. A
total of 12 soldiers were killed and 17 wounded.
One of the wounded later told Sabah daily
newspaper that they were able to see the PKK
militants taking up positions through night-vision
binoculars and thermal imaging devices, while
listening to their wireless communications.
When the PKK attacked, they overran the
outpost before reinforcements could arrive. They
then withdrew under fire into northern Iraq,
taking with them eight Turkish soldiers as
prisoners. On October 23, the PKK released
photographs of the soldiers in captivity.
The PKK's decision to incur the
operational burden of escorting the prisoners
through difficult mountain terrain while under
fire appears to indicate that it was part of a
preconceived plan. It was the first time that the
organization had seized a group of prisoners since
the mid-1990s, and at the time they subsequently
exploited them for propaganda purposes. It was
only after a Turkish parliamentary delegation led
by members of the Islamist Welfare Party traveled
to northern Iraq to negotiate with the PKK that
the prisoners were finally released.
Members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic
Society Party, which is widely believed to be
linked to the PKK, had earlier offered to
negotiate the release of the eight soldiers.
The Turkish military claimed to have
killed 32 PKK militants in hot pursuit operations
following the attack on Daglica. The claim,
however, has been denied by the PKK and the
Turkish authorities have yet to produce any
corpses of slain PKK militants. Nevertheless,
given their experience in the 1990s, the PKK high
command would have known that the attack of
October 21 carried the risk of high casualties.
It appears that they calculated that the
cost would be more than offset by the propaganda
benefits and the psychological impact on the
Turkish public not only of the high death toll but
also of the capture of the eight soldiers. The
Turkish media have already begun publishing
photographs of the prisoners' traumatized
relatives.
The seizure of the eight
soldiers also appears to be part of a wider
strategy of trying to force the Turkish
authorities into negotiations. The staging of the
attack on October 21, just days after the Turkish
Parliament approved a motion authorizing the
deployment of Turkish troops in a cross-border
operation against the PKK's presence in northern
Iraq, seems to have been designed to try to
provoke Turkey to threaten an incursion, in the
hope that the international community would
intervene and argue that a permanent solution to
PKK violence could only come through the opening
of negotiations.
Gareth Jenkins
is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul who
has written on Turkey for the past 20 years.
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