Star-marked articles are restricted to subscribers only. See subscription information . Meanwhile, it operates secretly in southern Turkey but openly in its bases in northern Iraq, where it engages with Iraqi Kurdish movements. In the garden, the student guerrillas chat in the shade of the trees. History, politics, religion, language and literature, arts and social sciences, all have a place in their education.
Students stay for several weeks, maybe several months.
Then they go back to their bases in Turkey or northern Iraq, where they seem to be well established. It's all one country. Small, her long brown hair tied back, and wearing a combat jacket, Nilan is a captain. She joined the guerrillas at the age of thirteen. Born in Cizre close to the Iraqi border and won over by the Young Kurds' revolt in the early 1990s, she was trained in the PKK camps of the Bothan-Badhinan region where Turkey joins Iraq.