A family collecting herbs walk past the site of a recent airstrike in territory controlled by the PKK in the Qandil mountains
Credit: Sam Tarling
It is a perfect outlaws’ refuge, a range of soaring peaks and plunging gorges cut off from the outside world. With networks of caves to hide in, Iraq’s Qandil Mountains are sometimes likened to Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden’s old bolthole in Afghanistan.
The guerrillas who make the Qandil their home, though, are very different to the al-Qaeda and Isis militants who have terrorised Iraq in recent years. The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party, is a secular, Marxist-inspired group whose guns are pointed mainly at neighbouring Turkey, where they have mounted a 30-year insurgency for greater Kurdish rights.
"The PKK are not terrorists, they are a revolutionary party," said Awaz Ismael, the “mayoress” of Qandil, which the PKK runs as an unofficial mini-state, complete with armed checkpoints. "All they do is fight tyranny, whether it’s in Turkey or elsewhere in the Middle East."
That is not the view of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who points out that some 40,000 people have died as a result of the group’s cross-border guerrilla war, and who has now launched a new military campaign against them.
Yet in the Qandil village of Endze, a mural of Ismael Özden, a top PKK leader, challenges Mr Erdogan’s narrative that they are just another bloodthirsty militant group. In 2014, when Isis began its genocide of Iraq’s Yazidi community, Mr Özden led a large PKK force that came to the Yazidis’ aid – saving countless lives while the rest of the world dithered.
Displaced Yazidis flee from Mount Sinja after it was invaded by Isis fighters in 2014
Credit: Sam Tarling
At the time, Iraqi government troops had fled Isis’s advance on the northern city of Mosul, leaving the Yazidi homeland around the nearby city of Sinjar defenceless. When Isis swept in, some 5,000 Yazidis were massacred and up to 7,000 more abducted into sex slavery.
Those horrific figures could have been even worse, had Mr Özden and his comrades not set up a secure corridor that allowed hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Yazidis to flee. When Mr Özden was killed by a Turkish airstrike in 2018 – carried out as he left a memorial service for victims of the Yazidi genocide – some Yazidis mourned him as a hero.
“The Yazidis were facing mass killings and slavery, so that is why the PKK came to their aid,” said Ms Ismael. “The PKK are there for anyone who needs help.”
Sinjar was not the only place that the PKK stood up to Isis. Their well-honed guerrilla skills also helped a Syrian Kurdish ally, the YPG, in their epic battles to dislodge Isis from the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Kobane. The YPG was also backed by the US military, who quietly overlooked the group’s links to the PKK, which America lists as a terrorist organisation.
Smoke rises above the Yazidi town of Sinjar, Iraq, shortly after the town was liberated from Isis by the PKK and Iraqi Kurdish forces in 2015
Credit: Sam Tarling
The blind eye that Washington turned reflects a wider Western ambiguity towards the PKK. Some say its egalitarian, Leftist ethos is a welcome challenge to conservative Islamic politics: it champions women’s equality, for example, most notably through female PKK fighting units.
Critics, though, claim it has cult-like tendencies, targeting the young and vulnerable for recruitment, and intimidating opponents or anyone who tries to leave.
There are also suspicions that the PKK was not entirely altruistic in its mercy dash to help the Yazidis. Since 2014, its fighters have stayed around Sinjar, ostensibly to help the Yazidis build their own security forces. But Turkey claims the group is trying to turn the area into a "second Qandil", extending its power base across northern Iraq.
Local Yazidi leaders, while grateful to the PKK for its help against Isis, say it has outstayed its welcome around Sinjar, which is now attracting airstrikes from Turkey.
"Of course we appreciate what the PKK did in the beginning, but why are they still here?" said Hazim Tahseen Bek, 56, the Prince of the Yazidis and their traditional community leader. He spoke to The Telegraph at his villa in the town of Ba’adra, north of Mosul, where a statue of a peacock – a sacred animal in Yazidi beliefs – sits on his table.
Hazim Tahseen Bek, the Prince of the Yazidis pictured in his home in Iraq, December 2020
Credit: Sam Tarling
"Lots of our people have been indoctrinated by them and taken up to Qandil,” he added. “Also, the PKK are not religious, whereas for us Yazidis, religion is very special. We don’t want anyone interfering in that."
The option of Sinjar as a second base has become all the more important for the PKK, given Mr Erdogan’s mounting pressure against them, which started in June with an intensive air campaign, Operation Claw Eagle. Advances in drone technology have made it much easier to hit PKK targets in Qandil, which were previously almost impregnable. When The Telegraph visited recently, locals complained of drones constantly prowling overhead.
To add to the PKK’s difficulties, in October Mr Erdogan secured a landmark security deal with the Iraqi government, under which the PKK was ordered to leave the Sinjar area.
Significantly, the deal is also backed by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. They have traditionally turned a blind eye to the PKK, but fear they are now destabilising already tense relations with Turkey. Furious at what they see as a betrayal by fellow Kurds, the PKK have launched attacks on KRG troops and officials, and sabotaged oil pipelines.
That, though, has merely helped convince Iraqi officials that there is no longer a place for armed groups in the country – be it Isis, the PKK, or anyone else.
"Yes, the PKK did fight Isis in Sinjar, but that doesn’t allow them to impose themselves there," said Safeen Dizayee, head of the KRG’s foreign relations department. "The PKK leaders who have been in the Qandil caves for the last 40 years have to realise that times are changing."
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