On Thursday, a nondescript building in Paris’ 10th arrondissement was transformed into a crime scene with international repercussions. French Interior Minister Manuel Valls came to witness the grisly sight created by the execution-style killing of three Kurdish women militants by an unidentified hit squad.
In the neighborhood, the Kurdish Institute is known as “the embassy.” But it has none of the trappings of a diplomatic mission. For years, it’s been a venue for occasional art exhibitions and conferences on Kurdish culture — and a place of assembly for Kurdish militants, especially those of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a mainly Turkish group with a Marxist-Leninist ideological background.
France banned the PKK after the European Union declared it a terrorist group, so there is no mention of it anywhere in the building. But journalists know it as the party’s information center.
Among the victims was Sakine Cansiz, a well-known campaigner for Kurdish causes. A redhead with a fading though still seductive beauty, Cansiz was one of the founders of the PKK and, according to rumor, a former lover of the party’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan.
The other two victims were Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, who worked as aides to Cansiz.
Who was behind the triple executions? The French police say they have several “working hypotheses,” but offer no details.
One theory is that the murders resulted from factional feuds within the PKK.
Since the start of 2011, the PKK’s been torn by debate over what to do about the conflict in Syria. Since last autumn, it has also faced splits over a new strategy of peace with Turkey.
In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad tried to prevent Kurds there from joining the popular uprising against his regime by granting citizenship to more than 300,000 of them. (Kurds claim that represents less than a third of the ethnic Kurds left in a juridical limbo since the ruling Ba’ath Party cancelled their citizenship in the 1960s.) He also ordered the release of over 600 Kurdish political prisoners, some after more than 30 years in captivity.
In exchange, the PKK agreed to forget grievances against the Ba’ath and prevent anti-regime rebels from entering Kurdish areas. Thus, the PKK and smaller Kurdish parties allied with it seized control of several key towns, and hundreds of PKK fighters who’d fled to Iraq returned to help the party impose its rule on sizeable chunks of Syrian territory. By last summer, the PKK and allies were manning more than 250 checkpoints in the mainly Kurdish areas of Syria.
In July, however, Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani convened a special conference in Erbil (the capital of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan) and convinced Syrian Kurdish parties, including the PKK, that throwing their lot with the dying Assad regime was a bad bet. No less than 22 Syrian Kurdish parties and groups decided to switch sides.
Yet a number of small groups, mostly linked to the Syrian and Iranian intelligence services, opposed the Erbil accord. They continued to regard Turkey as the Kurds’ principal enemy and saw the Syrian conflict as a diversion.
Then another dramatic event boosted the Kurds’ decision to move against Assad. A 68-day hunger strike among Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey ended with an offer of negotiations from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The jailed Ocalan reinforced the mood of reconciliation by offering to mediate a long-term settlement.
The war that the PKK had started against the Turkish Republic in 1984 looked as if it was heading for an end.
Both the PKK and the Turkish state are anxious to prevent sensitive areas in Syria from falling into the hands of Arab jiahdists. As a result, the Kurdish lobby in Paris had become an important voice in support of France’s tough position against Bashar al-Assad.
Thus, whoever killed Sakine Cansiz and her two colleagues must have been sending a warning — both to the 150,000-strong Kurdish community in France and to President François Hollande’s government.
France was the first country to recognize the opposition as Syria’s sole legitimate government and to unroll the red carpet for its leaders. Behind the scenes, Paris has also lobbied EU partners to prepare for possible military intervention.
French terrorism experts say any of three groups could be behind the Paris executions: a Syrian hit squad dispatched from Lebanon, a Lebanese Hezbollah gang working for Iran, or a splinter PKK faction opposed to reconciliation with Ankara and hoping to forge an alliance with the remnants of the Assad regime.
The Turkish security services seem unlikely culprits; they’ve always had an unwritten understanding with the PKK not to kill each other’s officials abroad. And Turkish security chiefs have been in secret talks with Ocalan for weeks, and would have no interest in killing his allies