Turkish Kurds, bordering Iraq, feel under attack

SILOPI, Turkey (Reuters) - Sabriya Akdogan left Iraq to marry in Turkey, but she still uses her mother tongue at home; she is a Kurd who married another Kurd and says that identity matters more than national borders.

"It's the same race, the same language, the same nation, the same Kurdish root," said her husband, Hasan Akdogan, who met her while visiting relatives across the border in northern Iraq.

The close ties and shared identity between Iraqi and Turkish Kurds are behind fierce local opposition to Ankara's threats to launch a major cross-border operation into north Iraq to tackle some 3,000 Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) rebels based there.

Masoud Barzani's semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq is a source of inspiration for many Kurds demanding more rights in southeast Turkey, who say Ankara's incursion plans aim to undermine the closest thing there is to a Kurdish state.

Barzani has pledged not to turn over anyone to Turkey and has vowed to fight back against any incursion, although he has called on the outlawed PKK guerrillas to leave.

Just months after the ruling AK Party saw big election gains in the southeast due to popular social policies and pledges to help the region, many are enraged by what they see as an attack on the Kurds as a whole and a bid to stop their progress.

"It's only to crush the Kurds, they see the freedom in northern Iraq and Turkey wants to crush it," said Zeki Macartay, an AK Party supporter and district chief in Cizre, a town near the border where men still wear traditional Kurdish dress and skinny cows graze for scraps in upturned skips.

"KURDISH PROBLEM"

At the same time, many also stress a kinship between Turks and Kurds, a need to live in peace and mutual self-respect.

The centre-right AK Party won many votes in the mainly Kurdish southeast in July parliamentary elections and promises to continue improving basic services in every village.

It was under the AK Party, which wants Turkey to join the European Union, that a ban on broadcasting in Kurdish was lifted though only limited broadcasts were allowed on a state channel.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan stirred hope in 2005 as the first Turkish leader to say there was a "Kurdish problem".

But local politicians and officials say schools are still understaffed and doctors are few. A ban on speaking Kurdish was lifted in 1991 but teaching of Kurdish is limited to private language schools. Those who speak only Kurdish struggle in hospitals and courts.

Cizre Mayor Ahmet Dalmis, who says even he finds Turkish tricky, says Kurdish publications are still closed down by court order while the region's politicians face dozens of cases against them, many just for things they have said.

"A case is opened against everything that's said ... it's not just politicians," said human rights lawyer and Diyarbakir Bar Association Chairman Sezgin Tanrikulu.

The mountains surrounding southeastern villages are covered with official Turkish slogans such as "Happy is he who says he is a Turk" and "The blood that flows is for the (Turkish) flag".

Turkey's estimated 15 million Kurds are not recognized as an ethnic minority. The constitution says every citizen is a Turk and Kurds were long designated simply "mountain Turks".

Izzet Belge, provincial chairman of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, says 80 percent of the people in the area sympathize with the PKK because of the identity issue.

Other estimates of support for the PKK, classed by the United States, the EU and Turkey as a terrorist organization, are much lower than that.

Nearly 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK took up its separatist armed struggle in 1984.

"The root problem is the government for years has not accepted our reality. Its attitude is 'You do not exist'," said Belge, adding that he believed the PKK would lay down its arms if the state genuinely recognized the Kurds' identity.

Economic hardship also fuels Kurdish anger in an area where coal miners, who lug their primitive picks and shovels home after 20-lira-a-day ($17) shifts, are among the best earners. A village barber earned 10 lira in the last three days.

An incursion into northern Iraq is seen by locals as a waste of money that could be invested in an area where many, including AK Party mayors, say unemployment is as high as 80 percent.

Veysi, a Kurd who made a living from smuggling until increased security made the route impossible, says his nephew fled to the PKK at 16, before the time came to follow the rest of the family into obligatory military service.

He shows a picture of his nephew, a fresh-faced boy with spiky bangs and sunglasses who was one of three people in the tiny village to join the PKK after dropping out of school.

"If he'd had a job, he wouldn't have gone to the mountains," he said.