Too important a story not to front page. This is why I came to the liberal blogs in the first place — to find vital, critical stories like this that no one in our self-censored American news media is either willing or able to tell. Steven D
Do you recognize this organization? It could very well be the spark that triggers the beginning of the end, an incredibly devastating and destabilizing war in the greater Middle East. And you and I are paying for it.
Is that an exaggeration?
I sure hope it is.
The acronymn PJAK stands for Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê, (which means “Party for Free Life in Kurdistan). Have you ever heard of the PKK or Kongra-GEL? The PKK/K-GEL is the terrorist (or freedom fighter) organization of Kurds fighting for a homeland in Turkey.
PJAK is the Iranian branch or equivalent of PKK/K-GEL.
First some basic facts about Iran. It is a country of approximately 70 million people. But only about HALF of those people are Persians or what we call “ethnic” Iranians.
Half of the country is ethnic Persian/Iranian but nearly the entire political and power system (theocratic rulers, military, politicans, etc) are ethnic Persian/Iranian.
One quarter of the country is Azerbaijani (or Azeri). About 8% or one in 12 citizens of Iran are ethnic Kurds. If Iran were the United States, there would be 9 million Kurds. Quite a lot! Ethnic Arabs come in around 3%.
What this means in short is that one ethnic group has a slim majority in terms of population but an absolute majority in political power. And while the Kurdish tongue and Kurdish ethnicity is SIMILAR to Iranian/Persian, the Kurds are not the same. And with Iraq being in the condition it is in today, with a completely safe zone for Kurds in the north, the independence/autonomy struggle for Kurds in Iran, Turkey and Syria has intensified.
I bet most people have never heard of PJAK. But here’s an article from summer 2006:
In 2005, according to the Iranian government, PJAK killed at least 120 Iranian soldiers in Iran. In 2006, PJAK may exceed this total. Already, it has launched dozens of attacks both from its camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and from its underground cells in Iran itself.
In one of its latest attacks, PJAK troops killed four Iranian soldiers on May 27 in a clash near the town of Mako in Iranian Kurdistan, the PKK’s Roj TV reported. PJAK, however, regards its military operations as merely complementing its wider effort to build a new Kurdish national identity among the four million Kurds who make up seven percent of Iran’s population. PJAK has around 3,000 troops based in northern Iraq, but claims tens of thousands of activists working inside Iran.
PJAK is quite literally conducting a war on the Iranian state and is launching attacks from bases in Iraq. These guys are fell funded. The governments of Turkey and Iran met last year to coordinate the fight against the PJJ/PJAK.
The AP just ran an informative article on PJAK by reporter Kathy Gannon, who spent 2 days with these guys (which she calls PEJAK):
The PKK and its affiliates are spread through a region of some 35 million Kurds that straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. PEJAK, the newest group, claims to number thousands of recruits, and targets only Iran – a mission which has made PEJAK the subject of intense speculation that it is being used to undermine the radical Islamic regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In the Nov. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that PEJAK was receiving support from the U.S. as well as from Israel, which fears Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Ahmadinejad’s call to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
PEJAK says it regularly launches raids into Iran, and Iran has fired back with artillery. In October, the English-language Iran Daily, published by Iran’s official news agency, said Iran accused PEJAK of killing dozens of its armed forces in insurgent attacks.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, a longshot Democratic presidential hopeful who claims the White House is overplaying the Iranian threat, last year wrote to President George W. Bush expressing concern that the U.S. was using PEJAK to weaken Ahmadinejad.
What is undisputed is that Turkey is going to hold both presidential and parliamentary elections this year. Turkish politicians and the Turkish people are pushing for some kind of action to curtail PKK/K-GEL attacks from Iraqi bases. See this article about what Turkish PM Erdogan had to say on the matter. The Turkish parliament has been meeting behind closed doors to decide what to do.
PJAK was not created directly by the United States but it seems clear they are benefiting from American assistance, either covertly in the sense of funds/weapons or indirectly by the American’s non-intereference with PJAK bases and training camps in northern Iraq.
I should also state that there are unverified reports that the pilot-less drone spy aircraft being used over Iranian airspace may be either controlled by PJAK or monitoring sites identified by PJAK operatives.
Here’s another article by a western reporter who managed to “embed” with PJAK in their training camps. And here’s an interesting quote indeed:
Most of the freedoms Turkish Kurds have been eager to spill blood over have been available in Iran for years; Iran constitutionally recognizes the Kurds’ language and minority ethnic status, and there is no taboo against speaking Kurdish in public. The PJAK Kurds want more: They want secular democracy, they say, and they want the United States to go into Iran to deliver it to them…
…The Iranian Kurds in Qandil are eager to do the same against Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs in Tehran–first by working with other Sunni [Arab] minorities to destabilize the central government’s hold on Kurdish areas, then by waiting for Washington to come in and help it make Kurdish autonomy official.
I also found a third western reporter who got to embed in with PJAK. How is it that three western reporters can embed in with an avowed militia whose public goal is overthrowing the government of a neighboring state? It’s because PJAK has no need to hide its bases, goals or objectives. They’re supported by the Kurds in northern Iraq and they are supported by the United States.
Iran has officially declared PJAK a terrorist group yet the United States is doing absolutely nothing to stop or hinder their operations. If that is not deliberate proof that the destabilization of the Iranian government is one of the options “on the table”, I don’t know what is.
The PJAK is just one terrorist group, along with others like the MEK (whose members are ethnic Arab) to the BLA (ethnic Baloch) who are being funded, supported and/or trained by the United States to foment unrest inside of Iran, scout out potential military targets and perhaps sow the seeds for war or a coup.
The PJAK have a very modern and up-to-date website (not in English), as do supporters of MEK (in English) as do supporters of the BLA (in English).
The goal of the United States is nothing less than complete hegemony over all of the oil-producing regions of the Middle East. And while we sleep and read and eat our breakfasts, these terrorist groups are slipping into Iran to kill and sabotage the internal security of that nation.
In my mind, all I can see are the words “blowback” and “mujahedeen” and “Osama bin Laden”. I sure hope we can avoid repeating this historical mistake but I sincerely doubt it.
Pax
I think visually so I hope this map helps put this entire thing into context:
The countries are labeled in Italian. The orange part is where the majority of the population are ethnic Kurds.
Pax
Who draw the map?! Did someone need a massive nation on Earth without its own state, but divided into minorities amongst several militant tribes? Stalin may look with envy…
If these fears come true, the irony would be that Iraq’s Kurds are considered today as the most civilised constituents of Iraq. They may have gained most of Bush’s war… if only they are not about to loose everything. There are more articles with fears of dynamite developments of Bush’s adventures.
NONSENSE.
The old canard that only 51 percent of Iranians are ethnic Persian speakers and thus the rest of Iranians are dominated minorities as ridiculous as claiming that that Scotts or Welsh in Britain are “dominated” by the English. In fact those “minorities” have been incorporated as part of Iran for as long as Iran has existed – which is a couple of thousand years.
The Supreme Leader of Iran is himself an Azeri.
One more map if you’re interested. Here is the ethnic breakdown of peoples living inside Iran.
Pax
This map is ancient and does not reflect the modern realities of Iran.
If you have a better map please post it. I’ve never been to Iran in my life and that’s the best one I could find.
Thanks!
Pax
50 years ago such maps made some sense but there has been a lot of migration esoecially to the cities as the general standard of living, access to education, healthcare and roads has increased. And linguistic variation is not the same as being a “persecuted minority” who are excluded from government. The present Supreme Leader of Iran is an “Azeri”, for example.
Let me explain to you what’s going on:
See, the Israelis don’t want the US and Iran to start to talk. Instead, they want the US to try to topple the Iranian govt – or at least remain on bad terms with them.
In order to do this, they have to convince people that the Iranian regime is weak and can be easily toppled if only the right sort of pressure is exerted. So, they’ve been painting Iran in simplistic terms, as consisting of a hated central goverment beset by “Freedom seeking” people etc. Remember when the “students” were supposedly going to topple the regime? Did that happen?
One form of pressure they want is sanctions etc. Another form of pressure is the encouragement of ethnic separatism. The NeoCons have been pushing this view that promoting ethnic separatism will lead to the destruction of the regime, since supposedly Iran as really just an “Empire” in which a bare majority of “Persians” have been “dominating” the non-Persians etc.
This might be believable for people who until know imagined Iran (and the entire mideast) as consisting of a single “Them” – the discovery that Iran is actually a multi-ethnic country is new to them. But just because Iran is multiethnic doesn’t mean that the rest of the NeoCon spin is true.
The current Supreme Leader of Iran, for example, is an ethnic “Azeri”. Many Iranians are of mixed ancestry and don’t identify themselves with such groupings. In fact in 2000 years, all of these groups have been part of Iran and have never formed a separate country of their own (except for two isolated incidents over very brief periods that lasted less than 50-80 years – and usually then only because of foreign interference.)
So this NeoCon idea that the Iranian “minority” ethnicities that are just waiting to break free from the “dominating Persians” is BS which is only believable by people who have never actually been to Iran or who have an agenda to push.
Oh and incidentally the Kurds have been frequently useful tools. The Shah and the US encouraged the Kurds in Iraq to rise up against IRaq in the 1970s – then the Shah and the US promptly abandoned them when they got the concessions they wanted from Iraq (when Kissinger was questioned about the morality of betraying the Kurds like that, he famously quipped that covert ops shouldn’t be confused with “missionary work”) Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran – along with the Soviet Union, Britain and the US and the various corrupt leaders of various Kurdish factions with their shifting alliances – have been playing on the romantic sentiment of Kurdish separatism for more than a century. Now, the Israelis have gotten into the game too.
In short, this is an old game, and the people who end up suffering the consequences are the average Kurds themselves.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Soj. Clearly this is a destabilization effort we’re more than happy to fund. This is disturbing re the lack of oversight of military support for such groups:
That’s from Sy Hersh, ala this source. I would have to add that, given Hersh’s close relationship with the CIA over the years, I wouldn’t write off the CIA as being a prime sponsor of this group, even as they seek to put the blame on the military. I’d like to say time will tell, but without an investigation, we’ll never really know, will we?
From the Edmonton Sun today (Canadian newspaper):
Read the rest at the link above.
This is an excellent discussion. It’s been clear to me for some time what the US is trying to do in this part of the world. I actively dread these last two years of Bush – and what he/Cheney will set in motion that’s going to last far beyond this administration.
The maps are personally helpful to me in sorting out the origins of some of my students, whose ethnicity often does not precisely match the public (US, that is) ideas about their “country of origin” – however that is defined.
That’s it. All they have to do is light the flame, and it will burn on for years to come. If we can keep the flame from being lit for another two years, I don’t think any Dems want to start it.
But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Keeping Cheney’s hand off the trigger. Bush seems more and more irrelevant every day. Cheney should be the target of impeachment.
It’s patently obvious that the Cheney/Neocon led Bush regime is working hard to provoke the Iraninan government into an overt act of aggression which they can then point to as the pretext for an attack. And, it certainly makes sense that many Kurds in the region would be perhaps enamored of the idea of an independent Kurdish state, and might act to some degree towards achieving such a thing.
But for me it’s quite a leap to accept on it’s face the idea that those Iranians running the show in Iran right now are foolish enough, stupid enough, to take the bait from a group of Kurdish zealots trying to goad them into blundering. Even if the US is using money and promises of all sorts of cool stuff to buy these PJAK folks and exploit the seeming confluence of interests, I have to say that the Iranian power players are way to smart to fall for such stuff, (as were the Syrians when the Bush regime was trying to work them over).
The only thing holding back Cheney and his fellow warmongering sociopaths from attacking Iran is concernthat the rest of the so-called civilized world will shun the US and wreak more damage upon their insane desire to establish hegemony across the entire planet. If China, Russia, Europe, and the Sunni-majority countries in the region to not back the neocon agenda for war with Iran, it will be the final stake through the heart of the neocon ideology.
So, despite their insane desire to proceed with war at any cost, the only folks on the planet they’re able to fool right now are a steadily decreasing segment of the American population and their looney rightwing Israeli counterparts. Even the big oil boyz will not support such a maniacal enterprise. The really delusional neocons like Ledeen and Kristol and Addington and Cheney and Netanyahu will keep pushing for war because perpetual war is their goal. But their former corporate and nationalist allies here and abroad are deserting them in now.They may launch an attack; after all Bush himself is such a petulant imbecile he hasn’t a clue what’s really going on. But I believe the Iranians are way too smart to take the bait. The neocons have been outsmarted at every turn almost everywhere for many years now. The only exception is that with the help of a self-serving and corrupt corporate media in the US and a gutless and unprincipled congress, they’ve succeeded over the short term these last several years in duping a vast number of the American public, destroyed as much of our Democracy as they’ve been able to do, looted the treasury, and disgraced America to a degree that will last several generations. (Oh yes, they apparently fooled the hapless Tony Blair in the UK too, and his legacy is now in ruins.)
I have no doubt the Iranian government will not take the bait.
But I have equally no doubt that the Bush team will stage a FAKE provocation, blame it on the Iranians, and use that as their fig-leaf justication.
This isn’t about a genuine incident. This is about the potential to create a fake incident, in my opinion.
I agree Lisa…they’ve been doing their damndest to provoke Iran for years now with no success so a manufactured ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ style incident is no doubt in our near future.
I fully agree they’ll continue to implement a plan to stage something to create the pretext for an attack; these are clinical sociopaths bent on war and world domination after all.
What I’m saying is that staged event or not, if the big energy corporate folks understand such attacks and widening of the chaosin the MidEast as bad for their business, then they will put a stop to it. Congress will never stop these lunatics, organized protest marches will never stop them, polled public opinion wil never stop them. Cheney and the Neocons are megalomaniacal sociopaths. Reason and measured criticism have no effect except to enrage them. They have no consciences, they are incapable of experiencing shame and they’re incapable of admitting error. They are authoritarians without the slightest regard for the value of democracy; (they view democratic processes and procedures as impediments to circumvent or subvert, not as mechanisms for effective and principled government that exercises restraint on the tendency of those in power to become afflicted with the malignant aspects of that power). So things like public opinion or congressional action mean nothing to them. They simply cannot respond in a normal fashion to the typical stimuli the broader family of man have learned to recognized as meaningful and important.
Wasn`t the PKK divided in two camps, the other being [PEK]? & were basically enemies until they reluctantly set aside their differences to halt losing their autonomous rule as Kurds, at the begining of the American invasion. They were then helping American forces against the Iraqis in Tikrit, after having been displaced by Saddam, who installed arabs in their homes. Am I on the right course here? This is very interesting. I was wondering how the strikes in Iran were being orchestrated & by who & with what funding. Are the Kurds going to be abandoned to the Turks as soon as they are no longer useful to the US?
With a football game on and plenty of Pond rules to debate and other things, I didn’t think this would get recommended.
Therefore let me add one more comment to clarify just why I wrote this.
If you click on the links, you will see PJAK/PEJAK is always, always hailed as being an organization which promotes gender equality. And it’s true. It’s one of their stated goals and several members of PJAK’s leadership are women.
PJAK’s been in full operation since 2004. What tripped my alarm bells ringing was that “all of a sudden” this AP reporter gets out to their base camp (yet again) and writes more of this mishmash where you half expect to see the Bad News Bears or the kids from Meatballs out there in the mountains of Qendil. Don’t be fooled in the slightest. PJAK is a disciplined military organization.
Would I rather see Iran run PJAK’s way with full equality and democracy and human rights? Yes of course I would.
But that does NOT mean I want to see them used as cat’s paws for CheneyBush in their never-ending obsession to create a “New American Century”.
I’m going to keep my eye on the press and see if there’s a sudden mysterious upswing in favorable mentions of PJAK. Then we’ll know that it’s really time to be scared.
Pax
It’s reminscent, to me, of the Contras – touted as the saviors of Nicaragua in the press, when in fact the group was wholly a creation of the CIA for the purposes of bringing about regime change. See Edgar Chamorro’s excellent little book “Packaging the Contras” (ghost written by Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley).
FWIW: US DoD running “special ops” in Iraq
via Raw Story, Inter Press Service News (IPS) established that DoD redeployed MEK for a clandestine war against Iran as early as 2005. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rice are said to have authorized MEK retraining to “augment” unmanned drones into Iran, operated by multiple US agencies stationed in Iraq.
Saddam originally formed MEK, whose membership is dominated by Iraq-Sunni nationals, to police Shi’ite civilians in Iraq. Ba’ath Party affiliation of the membership is unknown.
During the early months of US invasion in 2003, MEK headquarters north of Baghdad was captured and some 3,500 members were moved to US Camp Ashraf detention center, 60 miles west of Iran’s border.
Last year, press detected MEK invasions in two southern regional areas of Iran — Baluchistan (Sunni) and Khuzestan (Shia) — resulting in 100s of Iranian civilian deaths.
You’ve identified a very important piece of this puzzle, and one that I only knew peripherally. First, thanks.
In the run up to the Iraq fiasco, the Bush administration made a great effort to bribe Turkey into supporting us. Their hesitancy was exactly because of this: They understood far more than we did what could occur. They kept the money. The Muslim conservative candidates took the government.
Turkey is not yet in the EU, but has close ties. They are clearly representing the region’s concerns with European representatives, and making us look like fools. They will not allow the destabilization of Iran by ethnic Turks, because they know where that will lead.
This is a wonderfully informative diary with great comments. I don’t have anything to add, just mulling over everything I’ve read here.
Isn’t 8% of 300 million 24 million?
You said,
Just a small point. In general, your post is very thoroughgoing and interesting.
Thanks for all the research!
Ooops! Thanks. My math is atrocious as you can see 🙂
Pax