This article is 15 years old, but it is very important for understanding the present situation:
Turkey and Iran Face off in Kurdistan
March 1998
Turkey and Iran have for years been at loggerheads over a wide range of issues such as Iranian support for Turkish Islamists, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkey's growing cooperation with Israel, and the two states' competition over access to Central Asian oil. But perhaps the foremost problem between them concerns northern Iraq, where thoroughly unsettled conditions have embroiled these two neighboring states.
Though a remote and seemingly minor problem, and certainly a complex and confusing one, the conflict in Iraqi Kurdistan has both the potential to create a serious confrontation between these two regional powers and to drag the U.S. government into an open-ended commitment. The larger significance of these events makes it important to understand the confrontation taking place in Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington's role there, and the possible consequences of instability for U.S. policy in the wider region.
THE PLAYERS
Civil war broke out in May 1994 between the two main Kurdish parties of northern Iraq, Masud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Their fighting caused the virtual collapse of the de facto Kurdish state that had come into being at the end of the Kuwait war.
Two Kurdish parties. Each of the two main Kurdish parties has a distinct clientele and territorial base from which to draw support. The legendary leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani (1903-1979), father of its current leader Masud Barzani (b. 1946), established the Kurdistan Democratic Party in 1946. It is the more conservative, feudal, and tribal organization of the two and is associated with the Kurmanji-speaking, Bahdinani area of northwestern Iraqi Kurdistan. Jalal Talabani (b. 1933) established the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in 1975, following the collapse of the elder Barzani's movement earlier that year. It is the more leftist, socialist, intellectual, and progressive organization, and is associated with the Sorani-speaking area of southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. Both parties are nationalistic and enjoy equal support, as was shown by the almost exactly 50-50 split of the vote between them in the elections held in May 1992.
The KDP-PUK civil war is nothing new, for these two rivals have a long history of intermittent conflict that fully ceased only when they, along with a number of smaller parties, created the Iraqi Kurdistan Front in 1988. The fighting in August-October 1996 led to the creation of two separate rump governments in Iraqi Kurdistan: the KDP's headquartered in Irbil, and the PUK's in Sulaymaniya. As in previous Kurdish governments, neither Barzani or Talabani chose to serve in the governments they formed, a decision that crippled these from the start. A KDP document pointed to one of the reasons for this omission in declaring: "We shall not allow the sacredness and greatness of Leader Barzani to be disgraced. . . [by] the questioning, criticisms, innuendoes and daily abuse" that would be entailed in the parliamentary process. Significantly, the PUK cited this document approvingly.(1)
Operation Provide Comfort. In the aftermath of the Kuwait war, Iraq's Shiis rose up in the south of the country and its Kurds in the north, but neither proved capable of coping with Saddam Husayn's still stronger military. The uneven struggle in the north ended up with some 1.5 million Kurdish refugees fleeing to the Iranian and Turkish frontiers where many of them faced death from the hostile climate and lack of provisions.
This refugee dilemma created significant political problems for three statesIran, Turkey, and the United States. As an interim solution, Turkey's President Turgut Özal suggested that "safe havens" be created in Iraq where the Kurdish refugees would be protected from Saddam's forces. The United Nations Security Council provided partial legal backing for this unprecedented infringement on Iraqi sovereignty with Resolution 688 of April 5, 1991. This resolution condemned "the repression of the Iraqi civilian population. . . in the Kurdish populated areas the consequences of which threaten international peace and security in the region" and helped create a no-fly zone to keep the Kurds out of Saddam's grasp. U.S. planes enforced the no-fly zone by flying out of Turkish air bases in what came to be called Operation Provide Comfort (OPC)or in Turkey, Operation Poised Hammer. (OPC was then renamed Operation Northern Watch in 1997.)
This operation obviously depended on Turkish cooperation. Further, Turkey had great leverage over Iraq's Kurds, who were suffering a double economic blockade (as part of Iraq, they came under United Nations sanctions; as rebels, Saddam blockaded them); the ground outlet to Turkey served as the Kurds' lifeline to the outside world. At the same time, Turks felt great ambivalence about Provide Comfort, which many of them believed created a power vacuum in northern Iraq in which the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, or PKK) flourished. The PKK, a party of Turkish Kurds headed by Abdullah ("Apo") Öcalan, since1984 has mounted an insurgency against the Turkish government. Some Turks even argue that OPC was the opening salvo of a new Treaty of Sèvres that would eventually lead to the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and to the demise of the Republic of Turkey.(2) When an American airdrop accidentally delivered provisions to the PKK, the Turkish public, already irritated by the presence of a foreign military force in the Turkish midst, became widely suspicious of U.S.intentions.
To abandon the operation, however, was not realistic for the Turks, for this would both alienate Washington and diminish Ankara's influence over the course of events. OPC enables the Turks to launch military strikes at almost any time into Iraqi Kurdistan against the PKK; Washington cannot prevent such Turkish incursionsor else Ankara could threaten to end OPC. Ironically, then, an operation intended to protect Iraqi Kurds also permitted a crackdown on Turkish Kurds.
Tehran naturally disliked OPC because it allowed American and Turkish forces to intervene more or less at will in Iraqi Kurdistan. In response, it also intervened.
TURKEY AND IRAN TRY TO COOPERATE
The Turkish-Persian relationship, as Robert Kaplan recently noted, "is among the most complex of civilizational rivalries."(3) Unique among modern Middle Eastern states, the two countries possess a long tradition of statehood and imperial rule; they also share a complex cultural-political interaction, with the Persian language long dominating Turkey's high culture, and with Turks ruling Iran for long periods. These two neighbors also have a long history of warfare against each other, though roughly their current frontier (which runs through Kurdistan) was established following the Treaty of Zohab in 1639. Over the past two decades, the relationship has been complicated by Turkey's secularism and Iran's Islamism. Most recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they find themselves in competition vis-à-vis the Central Asian and Caucasian states (and especially their oil resources). Looking over the centuries, we see an imperial rivalry tempered by a tradition of coexistence resulting from both states seeing that restraint served their interests.
When it comes to Iraqi Kurdistan, this tradition prompts Turkey and Iran to cooperate in a variety of ways. Along with Iraq, the two states signed an agreement on September 15, 1993, to prevent illegal border crossings. With Syria, they held an ad hoc series of tripartite conferences beginning in 1992 to prevent a Kurdish state from forming in northern Iraqa precedent all three governments viewed as dangerous for their own restless Kurds. These conferences continued until 1995, when Turkey and Iran increasingly lent support to opposing factions in the Iraqi Kurdish civil war. At that point, Turkey backed Barzani's KDP in the hopes that it would help crush the PKK and keep open the Iraqi-Turkish oil pipeline that again became operational in December 1996. Iran supported the PUK, seeing it as a way both to interfere within Iraq, its long-standing enemy, and to prevent an increase of Turkish (and American) influence on its western border.
Despite this difference, Iranian-Turkish cooperation continued in several forms. A joint security committee exchanged information and carried out inspections relating to border security. In the spring of 1994, Tehran turned over fourteen PKK guerrillas to the Turks and maintained diplomatic relations despite the Turkish bombing of the PKK's Zaleh camp near the Iranian border killing twenty Iranians. Ankara prohibited activities in Turkey by the People's Mojahedin (Mujahidin-e Khalq), an Iranian organization with an Islamic and socialist outlook that is violently opposed to the Iranian government; it also rejected President Clinton's May 1995 call for cutting all trade and investment with Iran.
When Necmettin Erbakan, an Islamist, reached the Turkish prime ministry in June 1996, he took a series of steps to draw Iran and Turkey closer together. Symbolically, his first foreign travel took him to Iran, where he signed a $23 billion deal for Iranian natural gas and called for the governments of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq to meet and find a way to replace the U.S. planes enforcing Operation Provide Comfort. But Erbakan's efforts had little consequence.
TURKEY AND IRAN IN CONFLICT
During the 1980s, as the Iraqi government engaged in its terrible eight-year struggle against Iran, it could not fully enforce its fiat in the north of the country, Kurdistan. Accordingly, it agreed to allow the Turkish military to make frequent incursions into northern Iraq when in hot pursuit of PKK units harbored there. Although this agreement lapsed following the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Turks began a new series of military incursions into the territory following the end of the Kuwait war in 1991, now under the cover of Operation Provide Comfort.
Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurds, able to do little to prevent these forays, begrudgingly accepted them. In October 1992, Barzani's KDP and Talabani's PUK even appeared to join forces with Turkey to evict the PKK from its sanctuaries in northern Iraq, but the PKK's ostensible surrender to the PUK turned out to be more a charade than a defeat. In March 1995, Turkey sent some 35,000 troops into northern Iraq in another futile attempt to wipe the PKK out. In May 1995, Turkey's President Süleyman Demirel raised the stakes when he proposed a change in Turkey's border with Iraq in favor of Turkey, a statement that potentially raised Turkey's claim to northern Iraq from the 1920s . Demirel only withdrew his suggestion when it received a quick, universal rebuke from the Arab states and Iran.(4)
These Turkish incursions drew the predictable responses: heavy criticism from Tehran and support from Washington. The KDP, hoping to rid its territory of PKK intruders, supported the Turkish intervention; the PUK joined Iran in denouncing Turkey's actions. Despite the frequency and intensity of their operations, the Turks could not achieve their goal of eliminating the PKK from northern Iraq. Ankara blamed this failure on several factors, including aid and sanctuary that the PKK received from the Iranian and Syrian governments.
Tehran then took steps to strengthen its position in northern Iraq. It deployed (with PUK help) as many as 5,000 Iraqi opposition fighters near Sulaymaniya in November 1995, most of them members of the Badr Forces, the military arm of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI). Another key step took place in July 1996, when the Iranians sent 2-3,000 Iranian troops deep into PUK territory to pursue rebellious Iranian Kurds. This move strengthened the PUK, weakened the KDP, and thereby harmed Turkish and American interests. In response, the KDP reached a cynical, even a treasonous agreement with Saddam that permitted Barzani to retake Irbil from Talabani in August 1996. Both sides justified this action in part by referring to Iranian support for the PUK.
By soliciting outside aid, the two Iraqi Kurdish parties had greatly upped the ante of their on-going civil war and partially lost control over their fates. The Turkish authorities, alarmed over these developments, announced in September 1996 that they too would intervene in Iraqi Kurdistan. And, to interdict PKK raids into Turkey, they would establish a security zone extending several miles into Iraqi territory. Tehran responded with predictable anger, raising the specter of an "expansionist power lust of some power factions in Turkey" being "the basis for Ankara's decision to attack northern Iraq."(5) It called on Ankara to "immediately abort the plan." (6) Saddam and the KDP did not hold on to their summer gains for long, however; the PUK (with Iranian support) had regained practically all its lost territory by the end of October 1996, and the danger of an immediate Turkish-Iranian clash receded.
At this point, the Iraqi Kurdish parties had become partial proxies of their Turkish and Iranian patrons. The KDP, for example, blamed its woes squarely on Tehran: "The Iranian Islamic regime has stepped up its direct intervention in support of Talabani's PUK and has sent several thousand new troops with heavy weapons across the border.(7) A top aide to Barzani claimed that "one of the reasons for these [Iranian] attacks is our friendship with Turkey. We call on Turkey to help us."(8) Despite their close alignment with Turkey and Iran, the balance between the two warring Iraqi Kurdish factions hardly differs today from what it had been before August 1996.
The outbreak of internecine fighting among Iraqi Kurds in August 1996, which saw Turkey and Iran support opposing factions, then exacerbated tensions. An adviser to Iran's president denounced "the covetous eyes of the Ankara statesmen, which are focused on the oil resources in northern Iraq." In addition, he criticized both Turkey's proposal to establish a security belt along its borders with Iraq to prevent PKK infiltrations into Turkey as well as the "impudence" (9) of a subsequent Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan.
In keeping with their usual paranoia about the United States, the Iranian side invariably saw U.S. efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan directed against themselves. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, SAIRI's leader, declared after the failure of U.S.-Turkish-sponsored negotiations in Drogheda, Ireland, in August-September 1995, that "the talks failed because they were conducted with the aims of the U.S. and Turkey behind them and were against the policies of Iran."(10) Saddam Husayn's rampage through parts of Iraqi Kurdistan in August 1996 led the Iranians to claim that "Saddam's army moved into the Kurdish area with the U.S. green light."(11) Iranian commentaries denounced the "Ankara process"renewed mediation attempts by the United States, Turkey, and Britain to end the KDP-PUK civil war in October 1996 and January and May 1997as an attempt by the United States to establish "a spying base and spring board to carry out its malicious schemes in the region,"(12) and "a concerted effort [by] the U.S. and the Zionist regime. . . to create another Israel in the Kurdish areas."(13) Turkey's military interventions into northern Iraq, combined with its perceived role as America's cat's paw, exacerbated tensions with Iran.
A series of joint Turkish-Israeli protocols from early 1996 on also upset the Iranians, who saw these as a major threat. Defense Minister Mohammed Furuzande, for example, blasted Turkey for its "cooperation with the Zionist regime, which is threatening the Islamic world."(14) Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah `Ali Akbar Khamene'i, drew even more alarming conclusions, finding that these agreements with the Jewish state meant that Turkey "had bid farewell to Islamic traditions."(15)
DEVELOPMENTS IN 1997
Turkish-Iranian relations further deteriorated during the first half of 1997, when the secular Turkish military leadership accused the Iranians of supporting Islamist reactionaries in Turkey and the PKK in northern Iraq. The Border Security Research Committee of Turkey's parliament then made public a detailed report on the location of PKK training and logistic support camps in Iranian territory, along with border violations, attacks, and mine-laying activities by PKK guerrillas infiltrating from Iran.(16) General Kenan Deniz, the chief of the Turkish general staff's domestic security department, declared a few weeks later that "Iran is using terrorism for its political ends [and] giving logistical support to the PKK and also supports fundamentalist Islamic organizations. . . to harm the established order in Turkey."(17)
Further large-scale Turkish military interventions into northern Iraq took place in May 1997 and again in October 1997 when Turkish forces escalated their support for the KDP by bombing PUK and PKK positions and actually approached the cities of Irbil and Kirkuk. In the largest intervention to date, a reported 50,000 Turkish troops entered northern Iraq on May 14, 1997. The incursion had several purposes: to destroy PKK units, strengthen Barzani's KDP (hoping he would prevent future PKK raids), and balance Iran's relationship with the PUK. Turkey also sought to counter Iran's growing role in northern Iraq as a step toward preventing Iranian domination of the region. The Turkish military accused Iran of supplying the PKK with bases, transportation, medicines, hospitals, uniforms, and S-7 heat-seeking missiles. These missiles permitted the PKK, in an unprecedented action, to down two Turkish helicopters over Iraqi Kurdistan.(18) The Turks also claimed that Iran (along with Syria and Iraq) had mobilized forces along its borders with Iraqi Kurdistan.
Tehran denounced the Turkish invasion "as not only a violation of all international laws but the sovereign rights and territorial integrity of the Iraqi Muslim nation."(19) It characterized accusations of Iranian support for the PKK as "a joint conspiracy by the Turkish military and Israel."(20)
As this last tirade suggests, the Iranian reaction was clearly intensified by Turkey's growing military ties to Israel. Indeed, Turkey's Defense Minister Turhan Tayan had visited Israel just prior to the cross-border incursion of May 1997, when he and his counterpart Yitzhak Mordechai conferred about what they publicly called "common enemies."(21) Officially identified as terrorism and fundamentalism, these were widely understood to mean the governments of Syria and Iran, respectively. During his return visit to Ankara in December 1997, Mordechai stressed that the new Turkish-Israeli cooperation was of a "strategic" rather than "tactical" nature. He also implicitly identified Iran, Syria, and Iraq as "above the surface threats" because of their long-range missiles and non-conventional weaponry.(22)
The PKK also focused on this new tie. Its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, argued that the Turkish "operation was launched through the cooperation secured between the United States, Israel, and Turkey." Its aim was "not only to hit the PKK, but Iran as well."(23) One of Öcalan's field commanders added that the Turkish incursion was aimed at the Iranian and Arab peoples and was part of an Israeli plan to encircle Iran, Iraq and Syria.(24) Clearly, the new Turkish-Israeli tie strengthens Turkey's hand in its confrontation with Iran over northern Iraq by making both Israeli and U.S. technology more readily available to the Turks. In addition, Tehran must fear antagonizing Turkey too much over northern Iraq, which could push Ankara into allowing Israel to threaten Iran directly with forward bases in eastern Anatolia for reconnaissance or even preemptive strikes.
U.S. POLICY
Given the close American ties to Turkey and intense U.S. opposition to the Iranian and Iraqi regimes, these developments in Iraqi Kurdistan necessitate an American response.
Before discussing current options, it bears noting that historic American involvement has been decidedly inglorious; on three separate occasions in this century, Washington raised Kurdish hopes, and three times it failed them. First, Woodrow Wilson promised self-determination for the Kurds following World War I, seeing them as one of the non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire. But then nascent Kurdish hopes for autonomy or independence were squashed by a combination of Turkey's successful struggle to regain its territorial integrity and Great Britain's decision to maintain control over the oil-rich Kurdish region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
A half century later, in the early 1970s, the U.S. government encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to revolt against Baghdad, thereby also going along with the shah's wishes and pressuring the hostile Iraqi regime. When the shah decided to cut a deal with Saddam in 1975, he double-crossed the Kurds he had been supporting; Washington went along with its ally's decision. To rationalize American actions, Henry Kissinger, a leading architect of this policy, cynically explained that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work."(25)
Thirdly, in 1991 immediately after the Kuwait war, President George Bush encouraged "the Iraqi people to take matters into their own handsto force Saddam Husayn, the dictator, to step aside."(26) But the U.S. government did not follow up these words with armed intervention. Saddam's forces easily routed the Kurds who had rebelled. These three episodes should caution American policymakers not to promise more than they can deliver, but to limit their pronouncements and actions to what they know they can do.
(By way of postscript, Iraqi Kurds feel that the Clinton administration also failed to deliver the support it had promised during Barzani's and Talabani's trips to Washington in May 1993. Barzani then declared that "The international community will continue to protect the Kurds. . . . We heard this from U.S. Vice President Albert Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and National Security Advisor Anthony Lake."(27) Latif Rashid, vice president of the Iraqi National Congress executive council and brother-in-law of Talabani, told me that the U.S. government had promised Barzani and Talabani aid and protection. The Iraqi Kurds probably mistook general U.S. well-wishes as specific pledges of support.)
Today, a paramount U.S. goal in northern Iraq must be to achieve stability, so that Iran and Turkey do not engage in a conflict over the region, thereby drawing in the United States. This will be difficult to accomplish, given that Saddam seems likely to remain in power, thus perpetuating the unstable situation in northern Iraq and with it, the Turkish-Iranian confrontation. More generally, relations between the two governments remain tense. Their one major joint effort, the natural gas deal, is now moribund. In a dramatic move, Turkey's President Demirel walked out a day early of a high-profile meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Tehran in December 1997, apparently due to the conference's implicit criticism of his country's intervention in northern Iraq and its military cooperation with Israel. Symbolic of these tensions, Turkey and Iran (as of this writing) still have not returned ambassadors to each other's capitals after these were mutually withdrawn in February 1997.
At the same time, Turkey and Iran are unlikely to engage in overt conflict over northern Iraq. Their longstanding tradition of discreet statecraft and co-existence toward each other points to this, as does the strengthening of Turkey's position in northern Iraq thanks to U.S. and now Israeli support. So long as Turkish aims in northern Iraq do not escalate toward permanent occupation or annexation, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to challenge Turkey overtly. Over the past year, for example, Turkish, not Iranian, troops have repeatedly intervened in northern Iraqby official Turkish account, fifty-seven times since the early 1980s.(28)
For the U.S. government, this policy means simultaneously continuing to support Turkey in northern Iraq while tempering its support with emphasis on the importance that Ankara not aspire to permanent occupation or annexation there. More positively, Washington should emphasize its goal of maintaining Iraqi territorial integrity, in the hopes that a post-Saddam government will satisfy the Iraqi Kurds' demand for democracy and federalism.
1) Statement made by François Hariri, KDP politburo member, in the Sept. 29, 1994, issue of the party newspapers Golan and Khebat; as cited in PUK Foreign Relations Committee, "Iraqi Kurdistan: A Situation Report on Recent Events: The Context and Specifics of the Infighting in Iraqi Kurdistan," Feb. 1995, p. 11.
2) The stillborn Treaty of Sèvres (1920), imposed by the victorious allies upon the defeated Ottoman Empire, provided for the possibility of a Kurdish state. It was overturned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which made no mention of a Kurdish state.
3) Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 239.
4) See Daniel Pipes, "Hot Spot: Turkey, Iraq, and Mosul," Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1995, pp. 65-68.
5) Editorial in Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Tehran), Jan. 5, 1997, as cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Near East & South Asia (hereafter FBIS-NES), Jan. 5, 1997.
6) The Tehran Times, Sept. 7, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 7, 1996.
7) KDP press release, "Iran Has Stepped Up Its Intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan To Kill US Peace Initiative," Oct. 23, 1996. The KDP claimed that Iran had committed Revolutionary Guards Corps troops, as well as the Badr Forces mentioned above, an inaccurate charge (at that point, Iran limited its support to the PUK to providing logistical support and weapons).
8) Sami Abdurrahman, in Anatolia, Oct. 14, 1996, as cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Western Europe (hereafter FBIS-WEU, Oct. 14, 1996.
9) Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Tehran), Sept. 12, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 12, 1996.
10) Cited in "SAIRI Chief Interviewed on Internecine Strife," The Tehran Times, Oct. 11, 1995, as cited in FBIS-NES, Oct. 26, 1995.
11) The Tehran Times, Sept. 3, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 3, 1996.
12) Kayhan International (Iran), Mar. 13, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Mar. 14, 1997.
13) The Tehran Times, Mar. 1, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Mar. 4, 1997.
14) Briefing (Ankara), Mar. 17, 1997.
15) Keyhan (Tehran), Apr. 24, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Apr. 24, 1997.
16) Briefing, Mar. 17, 1997.
17) Agence France Presse, Apr. 29, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Apr. 29, 1997.
18) Briefing, June 16, 1997 and Sabah (Istanbul), May 30, 1997, as cited in FBIS-WEU, June 2, 1997. Other reports (The Washington Post, June 12, 1997, The Washington Times, June 23, 1997) accused Syria, Greece, Armenia, and Russia of supplying the S-7s to the PKK.
19) Kayhan International, May 27, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, June 2, 1997.
20) Daily Telegraph, June 11, 1997.
21) Briefing, May 12, 1997.
22) Briefing, Dec. 15, 1997. So as not to antagonize the Arabs, Turkey downplayed its ties with Israel as merely a "training program."
23) MED Television, May 17, 1997, as cited in FBIS-TOT, May 17, 1997.
24) Semdin (Parmaksiz Zeki) Sakik, MED Television, May 23, 1997, as cited in FBIS-TOT, May 24, 1997.
25) The Village Voice, Feb. 16, 1976, pp. 85, 87-88, an unauthorized reprinting of the U.S. House of Representatives, Pike Committee Report that investigated the CIA in the mid-1970s.
26) "Remarks to the American Association of the Advancement of Science," Feb. 15, 1991, Public Papers of the President of the United States: Administration of George Bush, 1991, book 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), p. 145.
27) Al-Hayat (London), June 22, 1993; cited in FBIS-NES, June 30, 1993.
28) Briefing, Dec. 15, 1997.
Turkey and Iran Face off in Kurdistan :: Middle East Quarterly
Turkey and Iran Face off in Kurdistan
March 1998
Turkey and Iran have for years been at loggerheads over a wide range of issues such as Iranian support for Turkish Islamists, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkey's growing cooperation with Israel, and the two states' competition over access to Central Asian oil. But perhaps the foremost problem between them concerns northern Iraq, where thoroughly unsettled conditions have embroiled these two neighboring states.
Though a remote and seemingly minor problem, and certainly a complex and confusing one, the conflict in Iraqi Kurdistan has both the potential to create a serious confrontation between these two regional powers and to drag the U.S. government into an open-ended commitment. The larger significance of these events makes it important to understand the confrontation taking place in Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington's role there, and the possible consequences of instability for U.S. policy in the wider region.
THE PLAYERS
Civil war broke out in May 1994 between the two main Kurdish parties of northern Iraq, Masud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Their fighting caused the virtual collapse of the de facto Kurdish state that had come into being at the end of the Kuwait war.
Two Kurdish parties. Each of the two main Kurdish parties has a distinct clientele and territorial base from which to draw support. The legendary leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani (1903-1979), father of its current leader Masud Barzani (b. 1946), established the Kurdistan Democratic Party in 1946. It is the more conservative, feudal, and tribal organization of the two and is associated with the Kurmanji-speaking, Bahdinani area of northwestern Iraqi Kurdistan. Jalal Talabani (b. 1933) established the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in 1975, following the collapse of the elder Barzani's movement earlier that year. It is the more leftist, socialist, intellectual, and progressive organization, and is associated with the Sorani-speaking area of southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. Both parties are nationalistic and enjoy equal support, as was shown by the almost exactly 50-50 split of the vote between them in the elections held in May 1992.
The KDP-PUK civil war is nothing new, for these two rivals have a long history of intermittent conflict that fully ceased only when they, along with a number of smaller parties, created the Iraqi Kurdistan Front in 1988. The fighting in August-October 1996 led to the creation of two separate rump governments in Iraqi Kurdistan: the KDP's headquartered in Irbil, and the PUK's in Sulaymaniya. As in previous Kurdish governments, neither Barzani or Talabani chose to serve in the governments they formed, a decision that crippled these from the start. A KDP document pointed to one of the reasons for this omission in declaring: "We shall not allow the sacredness and greatness of Leader Barzani to be disgraced. . . [by] the questioning, criticisms, innuendoes and daily abuse" that would be entailed in the parliamentary process. Significantly, the PUK cited this document approvingly.(1)
Operation Provide Comfort. In the aftermath of the Kuwait war, Iraq's Shiis rose up in the south of the country and its Kurds in the north, but neither proved capable of coping with Saddam Husayn's still stronger military. The uneven struggle in the north ended up with some 1.5 million Kurdish refugees fleeing to the Iranian and Turkish frontiers where many of them faced death from the hostile climate and lack of provisions.
This refugee dilemma created significant political problems for three statesIran, Turkey, and the United States. As an interim solution, Turkey's President Turgut Özal suggested that "safe havens" be created in Iraq where the Kurdish refugees would be protected from Saddam's forces. The United Nations Security Council provided partial legal backing for this unprecedented infringement on Iraqi sovereignty with Resolution 688 of April 5, 1991. This resolution condemned "the repression of the Iraqi civilian population. . . in the Kurdish populated areas the consequences of which threaten international peace and security in the region" and helped create a no-fly zone to keep the Kurds out of Saddam's grasp. U.S. planes enforced the no-fly zone by flying out of Turkish air bases in what came to be called Operation Provide Comfort (OPC)or in Turkey, Operation Poised Hammer. (OPC was then renamed Operation Northern Watch in 1997.)
This operation obviously depended on Turkish cooperation. Further, Turkey had great leverage over Iraq's Kurds, who were suffering a double economic blockade (as part of Iraq, they came under United Nations sanctions; as rebels, Saddam blockaded them); the ground outlet to Turkey served as the Kurds' lifeline to the outside world. At the same time, Turks felt great ambivalence about Provide Comfort, which many of them believed created a power vacuum in northern Iraq in which the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, or PKK) flourished. The PKK, a party of Turkish Kurds headed by Abdullah ("Apo") Öcalan, since1984 has mounted an insurgency against the Turkish government. Some Turks even argue that OPC was the opening salvo of a new Treaty of Sèvres that would eventually lead to the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and to the demise of the Republic of Turkey.(2) When an American airdrop accidentally delivered provisions to the PKK, the Turkish public, already irritated by the presence of a foreign military force in the Turkish midst, became widely suspicious of U.S.intentions.
To abandon the operation, however, was not realistic for the Turks, for this would both alienate Washington and diminish Ankara's influence over the course of events. OPC enables the Turks to launch military strikes at almost any time into Iraqi Kurdistan against the PKK; Washington cannot prevent such Turkish incursionsor else Ankara could threaten to end OPC. Ironically, then, an operation intended to protect Iraqi Kurds also permitted a crackdown on Turkish Kurds.
Tehran naturally disliked OPC because it allowed American and Turkish forces to intervene more or less at will in Iraqi Kurdistan. In response, it also intervened.
TURKEY AND IRAN TRY TO COOPERATE
The Turkish-Persian relationship, as Robert Kaplan recently noted, "is among the most complex of civilizational rivalries."(3) Unique among modern Middle Eastern states, the two countries possess a long tradition of statehood and imperial rule; they also share a complex cultural-political interaction, with the Persian language long dominating Turkey's high culture, and with Turks ruling Iran for long periods. These two neighbors also have a long history of warfare against each other, though roughly their current frontier (which runs through Kurdistan) was established following the Treaty of Zohab in 1639. Over the past two decades, the relationship has been complicated by Turkey's secularism and Iran's Islamism. Most recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they find themselves in competition vis-à-vis the Central Asian and Caucasian states (and especially their oil resources). Looking over the centuries, we see an imperial rivalry tempered by a tradition of coexistence resulting from both states seeing that restraint served their interests.
When it comes to Iraqi Kurdistan, this tradition prompts Turkey and Iran to cooperate in a variety of ways. Along with Iraq, the two states signed an agreement on September 15, 1993, to prevent illegal border crossings. With Syria, they held an ad hoc series of tripartite conferences beginning in 1992 to prevent a Kurdish state from forming in northern Iraqa precedent all three governments viewed as dangerous for their own restless Kurds. These conferences continued until 1995, when Turkey and Iran increasingly lent support to opposing factions in the Iraqi Kurdish civil war. At that point, Turkey backed Barzani's KDP in the hopes that it would help crush the PKK and keep open the Iraqi-Turkish oil pipeline that again became operational in December 1996. Iran supported the PUK, seeing it as a way both to interfere within Iraq, its long-standing enemy, and to prevent an increase of Turkish (and American) influence on its western border.
Despite this difference, Iranian-Turkish cooperation continued in several forms. A joint security committee exchanged information and carried out inspections relating to border security. In the spring of 1994, Tehran turned over fourteen PKK guerrillas to the Turks and maintained diplomatic relations despite the Turkish bombing of the PKK's Zaleh camp near the Iranian border killing twenty Iranians. Ankara prohibited activities in Turkey by the People's Mojahedin (Mujahidin-e Khalq), an Iranian organization with an Islamic and socialist outlook that is violently opposed to the Iranian government; it also rejected President Clinton's May 1995 call for cutting all trade and investment with Iran.
When Necmettin Erbakan, an Islamist, reached the Turkish prime ministry in June 1996, he took a series of steps to draw Iran and Turkey closer together. Symbolically, his first foreign travel took him to Iran, where he signed a $23 billion deal for Iranian natural gas and called for the governments of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq to meet and find a way to replace the U.S. planes enforcing Operation Provide Comfort. But Erbakan's efforts had little consequence.
TURKEY AND IRAN IN CONFLICT
During the 1980s, as the Iraqi government engaged in its terrible eight-year struggle against Iran, it could not fully enforce its fiat in the north of the country, Kurdistan. Accordingly, it agreed to allow the Turkish military to make frequent incursions into northern Iraq when in hot pursuit of PKK units harbored there. Although this agreement lapsed following the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Turks began a new series of military incursions into the territory following the end of the Kuwait war in 1991, now under the cover of Operation Provide Comfort.
Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurds, able to do little to prevent these forays, begrudgingly accepted them. In October 1992, Barzani's KDP and Talabani's PUK even appeared to join forces with Turkey to evict the PKK from its sanctuaries in northern Iraq, but the PKK's ostensible surrender to the PUK turned out to be more a charade than a defeat. In March 1995, Turkey sent some 35,000 troops into northern Iraq in another futile attempt to wipe the PKK out. In May 1995, Turkey's President Süleyman Demirel raised the stakes when he proposed a change in Turkey's border with Iraq in favor of Turkey, a statement that potentially raised Turkey's claim to northern Iraq from the 1920s . Demirel only withdrew his suggestion when it received a quick, universal rebuke from the Arab states and Iran.(4)
These Turkish incursions drew the predictable responses: heavy criticism from Tehran and support from Washington. The KDP, hoping to rid its territory of PKK intruders, supported the Turkish intervention; the PUK joined Iran in denouncing Turkey's actions. Despite the frequency and intensity of their operations, the Turks could not achieve their goal of eliminating the PKK from northern Iraq. Ankara blamed this failure on several factors, including aid and sanctuary that the PKK received from the Iranian and Syrian governments.
Tehran then took steps to strengthen its position in northern Iraq. It deployed (with PUK help) as many as 5,000 Iraqi opposition fighters near Sulaymaniya in November 1995, most of them members of the Badr Forces, the military arm of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI). Another key step took place in July 1996, when the Iranians sent 2-3,000 Iranian troops deep into PUK territory to pursue rebellious Iranian Kurds. This move strengthened the PUK, weakened the KDP, and thereby harmed Turkish and American interests. In response, the KDP reached a cynical, even a treasonous agreement with Saddam that permitted Barzani to retake Irbil from Talabani in August 1996. Both sides justified this action in part by referring to Iranian support for the PUK.
By soliciting outside aid, the two Iraqi Kurdish parties had greatly upped the ante of their on-going civil war and partially lost control over their fates. The Turkish authorities, alarmed over these developments, announced in September 1996 that they too would intervene in Iraqi Kurdistan. And, to interdict PKK raids into Turkey, they would establish a security zone extending several miles into Iraqi territory. Tehran responded with predictable anger, raising the specter of an "expansionist power lust of some power factions in Turkey" being "the basis for Ankara's decision to attack northern Iraq."(5) It called on Ankara to "immediately abort the plan." (6) Saddam and the KDP did not hold on to their summer gains for long, however; the PUK (with Iranian support) had regained practically all its lost territory by the end of October 1996, and the danger of an immediate Turkish-Iranian clash receded.
At this point, the Iraqi Kurdish parties had become partial proxies of their Turkish and Iranian patrons. The KDP, for example, blamed its woes squarely on Tehran: "The Iranian Islamic regime has stepped up its direct intervention in support of Talabani's PUK and has sent several thousand new troops with heavy weapons across the border.(7) A top aide to Barzani claimed that "one of the reasons for these [Iranian] attacks is our friendship with Turkey. We call on Turkey to help us."(8) Despite their close alignment with Turkey and Iran, the balance between the two warring Iraqi Kurdish factions hardly differs today from what it had been before August 1996.
The outbreak of internecine fighting among Iraqi Kurds in August 1996, which saw Turkey and Iran support opposing factions, then exacerbated tensions. An adviser to Iran's president denounced "the covetous eyes of the Ankara statesmen, which are focused on the oil resources in northern Iraq." In addition, he criticized both Turkey's proposal to establish a security belt along its borders with Iraq to prevent PKK infiltrations into Turkey as well as the "impudence" (9) of a subsequent Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan.
In keeping with their usual paranoia about the United States, the Iranian side invariably saw U.S. efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan directed against themselves. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, SAIRI's leader, declared after the failure of U.S.-Turkish-sponsored negotiations in Drogheda, Ireland, in August-September 1995, that "the talks failed because they were conducted with the aims of the U.S. and Turkey behind them and were against the policies of Iran."(10) Saddam Husayn's rampage through parts of Iraqi Kurdistan in August 1996 led the Iranians to claim that "Saddam's army moved into the Kurdish area with the U.S. green light."(11) Iranian commentaries denounced the "Ankara process"renewed mediation attempts by the United States, Turkey, and Britain to end the KDP-PUK civil war in October 1996 and January and May 1997as an attempt by the United States to establish "a spying base and spring board to carry out its malicious schemes in the region,"(12) and "a concerted effort [by] the U.S. and the Zionist regime. . . to create another Israel in the Kurdish areas."(13) Turkey's military interventions into northern Iraq, combined with its perceived role as America's cat's paw, exacerbated tensions with Iran.
A series of joint Turkish-Israeli protocols from early 1996 on also upset the Iranians, who saw these as a major threat. Defense Minister Mohammed Furuzande, for example, blasted Turkey for its "cooperation with the Zionist regime, which is threatening the Islamic world."(14) Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah `Ali Akbar Khamene'i, drew even more alarming conclusions, finding that these agreements with the Jewish state meant that Turkey "had bid farewell to Islamic traditions."(15)
DEVELOPMENTS IN 1997
Turkish-Iranian relations further deteriorated during the first half of 1997, when the secular Turkish military leadership accused the Iranians of supporting Islamist reactionaries in Turkey and the PKK in northern Iraq. The Border Security Research Committee of Turkey's parliament then made public a detailed report on the location of PKK training and logistic support camps in Iranian territory, along with border violations, attacks, and mine-laying activities by PKK guerrillas infiltrating from Iran.(16) General Kenan Deniz, the chief of the Turkish general staff's domestic security department, declared a few weeks later that "Iran is using terrorism for its political ends [and] giving logistical support to the PKK and also supports fundamentalist Islamic organizations. . . to harm the established order in Turkey."(17)
Further large-scale Turkish military interventions into northern Iraq took place in May 1997 and again in October 1997 when Turkish forces escalated their support for the KDP by bombing PUK and PKK positions and actually approached the cities of Irbil and Kirkuk. In the largest intervention to date, a reported 50,000 Turkish troops entered northern Iraq on May 14, 1997. The incursion had several purposes: to destroy PKK units, strengthen Barzani's KDP (hoping he would prevent future PKK raids), and balance Iran's relationship with the PUK. Turkey also sought to counter Iran's growing role in northern Iraq as a step toward preventing Iranian domination of the region. The Turkish military accused Iran of supplying the PKK with bases, transportation, medicines, hospitals, uniforms, and S-7 heat-seeking missiles. These missiles permitted the PKK, in an unprecedented action, to down two Turkish helicopters over Iraqi Kurdistan.(18) The Turks also claimed that Iran (along with Syria and Iraq) had mobilized forces along its borders with Iraqi Kurdistan.
Tehran denounced the Turkish invasion "as not only a violation of all international laws but the sovereign rights and territorial integrity of the Iraqi Muslim nation."(19) It characterized accusations of Iranian support for the PKK as "a joint conspiracy by the Turkish military and Israel."(20)
As this last tirade suggests, the Iranian reaction was clearly intensified by Turkey's growing military ties to Israel. Indeed, Turkey's Defense Minister Turhan Tayan had visited Israel just prior to the cross-border incursion of May 1997, when he and his counterpart Yitzhak Mordechai conferred about what they publicly called "common enemies."(21) Officially identified as terrorism and fundamentalism, these were widely understood to mean the governments of Syria and Iran, respectively. During his return visit to Ankara in December 1997, Mordechai stressed that the new Turkish-Israeli cooperation was of a "strategic" rather than "tactical" nature. He also implicitly identified Iran, Syria, and Iraq as "above the surface threats" because of their long-range missiles and non-conventional weaponry.(22)
The PKK also focused on this new tie. Its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, argued that the Turkish "operation was launched through the cooperation secured between the United States, Israel, and Turkey." Its aim was "not only to hit the PKK, but Iran as well."(23) One of Öcalan's field commanders added that the Turkish incursion was aimed at the Iranian and Arab peoples and was part of an Israeli plan to encircle Iran, Iraq and Syria.(24) Clearly, the new Turkish-Israeli tie strengthens Turkey's hand in its confrontation with Iran over northern Iraq by making both Israeli and U.S. technology more readily available to the Turks. In addition, Tehran must fear antagonizing Turkey too much over northern Iraq, which could push Ankara into allowing Israel to threaten Iran directly with forward bases in eastern Anatolia for reconnaissance or even preemptive strikes.
U.S. POLICY
Given the close American ties to Turkey and intense U.S. opposition to the Iranian and Iraqi regimes, these developments in Iraqi Kurdistan necessitate an American response.
Before discussing current options, it bears noting that historic American involvement has been decidedly inglorious; on three separate occasions in this century, Washington raised Kurdish hopes, and three times it failed them. First, Woodrow Wilson promised self-determination for the Kurds following World War I, seeing them as one of the non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire. But then nascent Kurdish hopes for autonomy or independence were squashed by a combination of Turkey's successful struggle to regain its territorial integrity and Great Britain's decision to maintain control over the oil-rich Kurdish region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
A half century later, in the early 1970s, the U.S. government encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to revolt against Baghdad, thereby also going along with the shah's wishes and pressuring the hostile Iraqi regime. When the shah decided to cut a deal with Saddam in 1975, he double-crossed the Kurds he had been supporting; Washington went along with its ally's decision. To rationalize American actions, Henry Kissinger, a leading architect of this policy, cynically explained that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work."(25)
Thirdly, in 1991 immediately after the Kuwait war, President George Bush encouraged "the Iraqi people to take matters into their own handsto force Saddam Husayn, the dictator, to step aside."(26) But the U.S. government did not follow up these words with armed intervention. Saddam's forces easily routed the Kurds who had rebelled. These three episodes should caution American policymakers not to promise more than they can deliver, but to limit their pronouncements and actions to what they know they can do.
(By way of postscript, Iraqi Kurds feel that the Clinton administration also failed to deliver the support it had promised during Barzani's and Talabani's trips to Washington in May 1993. Barzani then declared that "The international community will continue to protect the Kurds. . . . We heard this from U.S. Vice President Albert Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and National Security Advisor Anthony Lake."(27) Latif Rashid, vice president of the Iraqi National Congress executive council and brother-in-law of Talabani, told me that the U.S. government had promised Barzani and Talabani aid and protection. The Iraqi Kurds probably mistook general U.S. well-wishes as specific pledges of support.)
Today, a paramount U.S. goal in northern Iraq must be to achieve stability, so that Iran and Turkey do not engage in a conflict over the region, thereby drawing in the United States. This will be difficult to accomplish, given that Saddam seems likely to remain in power, thus perpetuating the unstable situation in northern Iraq and with it, the Turkish-Iranian confrontation. More generally, relations between the two governments remain tense. Their one major joint effort, the natural gas deal, is now moribund. In a dramatic move, Turkey's President Demirel walked out a day early of a high-profile meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Tehran in December 1997, apparently due to the conference's implicit criticism of his country's intervention in northern Iraq and its military cooperation with Israel. Symbolic of these tensions, Turkey and Iran (as of this writing) still have not returned ambassadors to each other's capitals after these were mutually withdrawn in February 1997.
At the same time, Turkey and Iran are unlikely to engage in overt conflict over northern Iraq. Their longstanding tradition of discreet statecraft and co-existence toward each other points to this, as does the strengthening of Turkey's position in northern Iraq thanks to U.S. and now Israeli support. So long as Turkish aims in northern Iraq do not escalate toward permanent occupation or annexation, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to challenge Turkey overtly. Over the past year, for example, Turkish, not Iranian, troops have repeatedly intervened in northern Iraqby official Turkish account, fifty-seven times since the early 1980s.(28)
For the U.S. government, this policy means simultaneously continuing to support Turkey in northern Iraq while tempering its support with emphasis on the importance that Ankara not aspire to permanent occupation or annexation there. More positively, Washington should emphasize its goal of maintaining Iraqi territorial integrity, in the hopes that a post-Saddam government will satisfy the Iraqi Kurds' demand for democracy and federalism.
1) Statement made by François Hariri, KDP politburo member, in the Sept. 29, 1994, issue of the party newspapers Golan and Khebat; as cited in PUK Foreign Relations Committee, "Iraqi Kurdistan: A Situation Report on Recent Events: The Context and Specifics of the Infighting in Iraqi Kurdistan," Feb. 1995, p. 11.
2) The stillborn Treaty of Sèvres (1920), imposed by the victorious allies upon the defeated Ottoman Empire, provided for the possibility of a Kurdish state. It was overturned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which made no mention of a Kurdish state.
3) Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 239.
4) See Daniel Pipes, "Hot Spot: Turkey, Iraq, and Mosul," Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1995, pp. 65-68.
5) Editorial in Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Tehran), Jan. 5, 1997, as cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Near East & South Asia (hereafter FBIS-NES), Jan. 5, 1997.
6) The Tehran Times, Sept. 7, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 7, 1996.
7) KDP press release, "Iran Has Stepped Up Its Intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan To Kill US Peace Initiative," Oct. 23, 1996. The KDP claimed that Iran had committed Revolutionary Guards Corps troops, as well as the Badr Forces mentioned above, an inaccurate charge (at that point, Iran limited its support to the PUK to providing logistical support and weapons).
8) Sami Abdurrahman, in Anatolia, Oct. 14, 1996, as cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Western Europe (hereafter FBIS-WEU, Oct. 14, 1996.
9) Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Tehran), Sept. 12, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 12, 1996.
10) Cited in "SAIRI Chief Interviewed on Internecine Strife," The Tehran Times, Oct. 11, 1995, as cited in FBIS-NES, Oct. 26, 1995.
11) The Tehran Times, Sept. 3, 1996, as cited in FBIS-NES, Sept. 3, 1996.
12) Kayhan International (Iran), Mar. 13, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Mar. 14, 1997.
13) The Tehran Times, Mar. 1, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Mar. 4, 1997.
14) Briefing (Ankara), Mar. 17, 1997.
15) Keyhan (Tehran), Apr. 24, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Apr. 24, 1997.
16) Briefing, Mar. 17, 1997.
17) Agence France Presse, Apr. 29, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, Apr. 29, 1997.
18) Briefing, June 16, 1997 and Sabah (Istanbul), May 30, 1997, as cited in FBIS-WEU, June 2, 1997. Other reports (The Washington Post, June 12, 1997, The Washington Times, June 23, 1997) accused Syria, Greece, Armenia, and Russia of supplying the S-7s to the PKK.
19) Kayhan International, May 27, 1997, as cited in FBIS-NES, June 2, 1997.
20) Daily Telegraph, June 11, 1997.
21) Briefing, May 12, 1997.
22) Briefing, Dec. 15, 1997. So as not to antagonize the Arabs, Turkey downplayed its ties with Israel as merely a "training program."
23) MED Television, May 17, 1997, as cited in FBIS-TOT, May 17, 1997.
24) Semdin (Parmaksiz Zeki) Sakik, MED Television, May 23, 1997, as cited in FBIS-TOT, May 24, 1997.
25) The Village Voice, Feb. 16, 1976, pp. 85, 87-88, an unauthorized reprinting of the U.S. House of Representatives, Pike Committee Report that investigated the CIA in the mid-1970s.
26) "Remarks to the American Association of the Advancement of Science," Feb. 15, 1991, Public Papers of the President of the United States: Administration of George Bush, 1991, book 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), p. 145.
27) Al-Hayat (London), June 22, 1993; cited in FBIS-NES, June 30, 1993.
28) Briefing, Dec. 15, 1997.
Turkey and Iran Face off in Kurdistan :: Middle East Quarterly
