JOKE INTELLIGENCE

There is an "intelligence website" emanating from Israel called Debka.  This Monday (September 24), it breathlessly blared Iran and Turkey Prepare for War in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Debka's "exclusive military sources in Iraq" have revealed just to the website alone that "Turkish and Iranian air units as well as armored, paratroop, special operations and artillery forces are poised for an imminent coordinated invasion of the northern Iraqi autonomous province of Kurdistan."

Since I am in Iraqi Kurdistan meeting with Kurdish resistance movements operating in Iran, I showed them the story.  They laughed their heads off.

The story claimed the target of the "coordinated invasion" supposedly are PKK/PJAK "rebels" reportedly "holed up" in Iraq's Quandil Mountains.  PKK is the Marxist Kurdish Workers Party, while PJAK, the Kurdish Free Life Party, is its subsidiary in Iran.

My Kurdish friends tell me, "We would love for this story to be true.  For PKK/PJAK to be destroyed would be a blessing for us.  They are paid and supplied by Iran, ‘under contract' as you say by Iran to attack us and block our resistance activities inside Iran."

"The main PKK base is near Urumia in northwest Iran," they further explained.  "Turkey knows all about it, of course, but actually encourages  a low level of PKK attacks within Turkey as an excuse to keep suppressing Kurdish freedoms in order to ‘fight terrorism'." 

Then the Debka story got even funnier.

It went on to claim that Iran would use "its expeditionary force to grab extensive parts of Kurdistan and strike a strategic foothold in northern Iraq," while Turkey would be "seizing northern Iraqi oil fields centered on the oil-rich town of Kirkuk."

As if the world's most powerful military which has massive forces and firepower in Iraq – America's – would just let the Turks and Persians walk right in and take the northern part of it over.

This is a hallucination posing as super-secret "intelligence."

Turkey and Iran are indeed cooperating to destabilize Iraq Kurdistan.  President of Iraq Jalal Talabani (himself a Kurd) accused both of "interfering in our internal affairs" during an interview aired by National Public Radio this Monday (September 25).

He was referring to their support of the PKK/PJAK.  That's why a naïve story claiming Turkey and Iran were planning an attack on the very people they support without any knowledge of that support makes it joke "intelligence."

Which is why my Kurdish friends here in northern Iraq are laughing.  But they don't laugh about radical Islamic Iran's using Marxist Mafiosi like the PKK against them.  It's understanding dynamics like this that requires genuine intelligence, in both senses of the word.