Written by Dr. Amy L. Beam   

ISID Invades Another Kurdish Town

On August 7, 2014, at 6 PM, the town of Mahmur Camp, established 20 years ago by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for Kurds fleeing Turkey, was invaded by the "Islamic State" known as ISID in Turkey and Iraq (pronounced I-SHEED) or ISIS or ISIL in western media.

Sketchy reports from Mahmur to family members in Turkey on August 7, before phone communications were cut, describe the evacuation of all 25,000 residents of Mahmur. Bus loads are crossing the border into Silopi, Turkey.

Caravans of cars from Hilal, a village in the township of Uludere, Sirnak, and surrounding villages in SE Turkey have been driving to the Turkey-Iraq border to pick up their relatives . . . mostly women and children . . . fleeing the ISID invasion. Those without Turkish passports are fleeing through mountain passes.

Residents from Mahmur in recent days have reported that there is no presence of Iraqi military or Peshmerga forces. The only people defending this town of 25,000 Kurds, besides the male residents themselves, are the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from Turkey and PJAK, its counterpart from Iran.

Both groups of resistance fighters have been labeled terrorist groups by Turkey in spite of wide-spread Kurdish support and international calls to remove the PKK from the terrorist list. This situation reinforces the PKK guerillas' motto that Kurds have "no friends but the mountains."

Far from wanting to defend the residents of Mahmur Camp, Turkey and the U.S. have a long-standing pact to eliminate it, claiming it is a training ground for PKK with that over-used word "terrorist" tagged on at the end. This includes all of the children, most of whom were born there.

Kurdish Refugees: from Turkey to Iraq and Back Again, a 20-year Saga

The Kurdish populations of both Mahmur and neighboring Shingal are political refugees from Turkey. In the late 1990s, Turkey's military destroyed an estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in southeast Turkey under the false pretense of denying shelter to the PKK Kurdish resistance fighters.

Between one and three million Kurdish residents were forced from their homes and their villages and animals were burned and bombed. Many innocent Kurds were murdered by military forces before they could flee.

In old Hilal, alone, 5600 Kurds were forced out. Three thousand settled in Mahmur Camp in Iraq. Other Kurds from the villages of Tasdelen, Uludere, Uzungecit, and Beytussebap also settled in Mahmur Camp. It grew into a small city of 25,000 people until it was invaded by ISID on July 7.

Nearly 20,000 Kurds, displaced from the unlawful and violent village evacuations in southeast Turkey also re-settled in Erbil, Souleymani, Zakho, Cuhok, Mosul, and Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Twenty years have passed and now these Kurds from Turkey once again find themselves as refugees fleeing for their lives. Many are crossing back into Turkey with their Turkish passports.

But there is a problem: Turkey accuses residents of Mahmur of being PKK guerillas and has prosecuted some who previously returned to Turkey.

ISID: A Media Lie to Enflame Islamaphobia and Divide Iraq

Before taking control of Mahmur, ISID took control of the predominately Yezidi town of Shingal (also referred to as Sinjar), west of Mosul. The Peshmerga military forces of Kurdistan (KRG), Iraq, abandoned their defense of the town. The President of the Kurdistan region, Massoud Barzani, announced this week he would investigate some Peshmerga commanders who left their positions in the Kurdish town of Shingal and failed to defend the Kurdistan region border from the attack of ISID.

According to western media reports, ISID demanded that Yezidis either leave, pay large sums of money, or convert to Islam. Over 200,000 have fled to the mountains and beyond. The United Nations calls it a humanitarian tragedy. It is reported that ISID has taken 500 women hostage.

News of ISID's attack on Shingal has enflamed the non-Muslim world and fanned the flames of Islamaphobia just when westerners were growing weary of the war on terror.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Mahmur's population is Muslim, yet it too has been attacked by ISID. So ISID's campaign is not about religion. The sentiment shared by all of Turkey's Muslim population is that the violent ISID forces do not reflect Islamic values.

"If ISID is Muslim," say Muslims, "then I cannot call myself a Muslim. ISID has nothing to do with Islam. It is just a terrorist organization. No Muslim would murder innocent people either Christian or Muslim. ISID is a lie."

ISID is a lie. This is the recurring sentiment in the Muslim world. This media lie needs to be investigated and the truth uncovered.

If ISID terrorism of civilian populations is not based on Islamic fundamentalism, then what is the motivation behind their campaign to take over the oil-rich territory of north-western Iraq? Who is financing ISID? Why did the Iraqi military abandon its posts and let ISID take Mosul on June 10? Why did the Peshmerga forces abandon Shingal and Mahmur Camp? What is the end-game-plan?

Could it be a land-grab to control the path between Mosul and Ceyhan the port where Kurdistan's oil is being pumped to Turkey for export to western countries?

A History Refresher in Kurdistan Oil

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Turkey under the false pretense of destroying non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). After a ten-year war, no WMD's were found, but Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed . . . except for Kurdistan in northern Iraq. That is where the oil is, predominately in Erbil, Kirkuk, and Mosul.

The U.S. protected the no-fly zone over Kurdistan while military commanders and private contractors bought shares in future oil companies and contracts. After ten years of war, Kurdistan built direct oil pipe lines from Mosul to Ceyhan, Turkey. Kurdistan agreed to ship 400,000 barrels per day to Turkey by the end of 2013. Multinational oil companies like Exxon, Marathon, and Chevron were finally going to get their oil. . . .

Until Baghdad threatened Ankara with smuggling if they bought one drop of oil without going through Baghdad. Baghdad wants its King's Ransom in the form of government taxation. So the promised oil did not flow.

Winter and spring passed. PM Erdoğan called for peaceful negotiations with Baghdad for oil. By May 2014, the oil companies and western countries were growing impatient.

Within days of one another, the major western media outlets (psychically) announced it would not be long now before the oil shipments started. One must wonder who provided these news outlets with their script.

Voila! As predicted, a few days later, on May 21, the first container ships loaded with oil left Ceyhan, Turkey. One headed to Israel which was the first buyer of Kurdistan oil via Turkey. Another ship headed to the United States.

On May 23, Baghdad headed to Paris and filed for arbitration against Turkey with the International Chamber of Commerce to stop exports of oil from Kurdistan. This put Obama in the awkward back-against-the-wall situation of supporting the purchase of oil from Kurdistan or backing the Baghdad government for which the U.S. purportedly fought a ten-year war to bring "freedom and democracy" to Iraq.

When the "United Leadership" oil tanker was off the coast of America, it did a mysterious u-turn on May 30 and headed back to Europe. KRG's Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani said in parliament. "If we cannot reach a shared understanding, we have other options and we cannot wait forever." He did not have long to wait.

Ten days later, on June 10, the world woke up to a terrorist group called ISIS (or ISIL or ISID) which no one seemed to have ever heard of in the west except for people in those three-letter agencies. ISID captured Mosul, oil center of Kurdistan, Iraq, as the Iraqi military and police laid down their uniforms and guns and vanished. Political analysts suspected external countries were orchestrating the break-up of Iraq into three countries.

The following week, US Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said the US has been arming the ISIL militants in Syria. “I think we have to understand first how we got here,” Paul said. “We have been arming ISIS in Syria.”

2006 Pentagon Map for the Middle East Resurfaces

By June 25, western media outlets, including Time magazine, were predicting the "unavoidable" break-up of Iraq into three countries.

The Pentagon's sequestered map of 2006 in which it redrew the borders of the "new" Middle East suddenly resurfaced. It includes a country called Kurdistan which incorporates eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria.

This map was shown at a Pentagon meeting in 2006, but vanished when Turkey raised a firestorm over it. There would be no country called Kurdistan. Now, here we are in 2014 with the same proposed map. It just took considerably longer than anticipated.

Turkey's Choice to Preserve Its Borders

If the United States and Europe want Kurdistan's oil, then they and Turkey need to support the Kurds who offer the best choice for democracy and human rights in the Middle East. That includes removing the PKK from the terrorist list, providing urgently needed military aid to them as they defend Mahmur Camp, and providing humanitarian aid to thousands of new Kurdish refugees. The Turkish government needs to abandon the entrenched mindset that "every Kurd is a terrorist."

If Turkey wants to find internal peace with its own Kurds and maintain the integrity of its borders, the Turkish government must address the cost of compensation and resettlement of thousands of Kurds whom were illegally and forcibly displaced from Turkey in the 1990s. It should not wait for the European Court of Human Rights to order compensation.

UPDATED: 19:00, August 8, 2014

Kurdish PKK Forces Gather to Retake Mahmur Camp and Shingal

Fighting continued today at UNHCR Mahmur Camp in northern Iraq. ISID (also referred to as ISIS or ISIL) controls it from inside. Twenty ISID are reported to have been killed. All residents have left the town. The men of Mahmur Camp remain in the mountains approximately 15 km from town. Three of them were killed today during fighting.

Also killed this afternoon was Deniz Firat, a young female journalist who lived in Mahmur Camp and was a reporter for IMC TV in Turkey. The Kurdish Firat News Agency has condemned the attack by ISID calling them enemies of humanity. Firat News said Deniz Firat was their principle source of reports from the front.

As is so common in Turkey which censors websites that mention the PKK, FiratNews.com is blocked today in Turkey so the photo of journalist Deniz Firat and the report of her death cannot be seen. This unrelenting suppression of the mere reference to the PKK does not bode well for Mahmur Camp expecting any Turkish, Iraqi, or American forces coming to its defense.

Kurdish PKK forces have gathered in the last 24 hours near Mahmur Camp from surrounding areas including guerilla forces from HPG (Kandil mountains, Iraq), YPG (Syria), PJAK (Iran), KDP (Peshmerga), and YNK (Taliban). In addition to guerilla forces, many Kurdish civilians with relatives driven out of Mahmur Camp have arrived from Turkey to join them in the surrounding mountains.

Mahmur Camp is an official United Nations refugee camp. As such, the United Nations had both a moral and legal obligation to defend its residents.