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The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence
New York University Press
August 2007
On Sale: August 1, 2007
368 pages
ISBN: 0814757111
EAN: 9780814757116
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The Kurds, who number some 25 million people in the Middle
East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored
by the West, Kurds are now highly visible actors on the
world's political stage. More than half of them live in
Turkey, where the Kurdish struggle has gained new strength
and attention since the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in
neighboring Iraq. Essential to understanding modern-day Kurds-and their
continuing demands for an independent state-is understanding
the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party. A guerilla force that
was founded in 1978 by a small group of ex-Turkish
university students, the PKK radicalized the Kurdish
national movement in Turkey, becoming a tightly-organized,
well-armed fighting force of some 15,000, with a
50,000-member civilian militia in Turkey and tens of
thousands of active backers in Europe. The war they waged in
Turkey through 1999 left nearly 40,000 people dead and drew
in the neighboring states Iran, Iraq and Syria, which all
sought to use the PKK for their own purposes. Since 2004,
emboldened by Iraqi Kurds who have established a
near-autonomous Kurdish land in the northernmost reaches of
Iraq, the PKK has again turned to violence to meet its
objectives. Blood and Belief combines reportage and scholarship to give
the first, in-depth account of the PKK. Aliza Marcus, one of
the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote
about their war for many years for a variety of prominent
publications before being put on trial in Turkey for her
reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their
supporters and opponents throughout the world-including the
Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services
that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break
them up-Marcus provides an in-depth account of this
influential radical group.
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