MT. QANDIL, Iraq — Grim-faced, the teen-age boys squatted around a Kurdish guerrilla showing them how to strip and assemble a machine gun. Soon, they would be using the weapon in a conflict that is almost 70 years old--the Kurds' fight for an independent homeland in Iran.
The Iraqi-backed Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran has in recent weeks stepped up its attacks on Iranian military bases and economic targets.
Guerrilla chieftains at the KDP base camp here in the Iraqi mountains said the youngsters will go into action, as their fathers and grandfathers have before them, in the mountains of northwestern Iran.
"They get three months' training in weapons, explosives and guerrilla tactics, then join units inside Iran to carry out hit-and-run attacks," said the camp commander, who would identify himself only as Salam.
It is a war that has largely been overshadowed by Kurdish campaigns in neighboring Turkey and in Iraq itself. In southeastern Turkey, the outlawed Kurdish Labor Party has been fighting a guerrilla war for five years to establish a separate Marxist state.
About 20 million Kurds--Sunni Muslims of Aryan stock--live in an overlapping area where the borders of Soviet Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey converge, a region once known as Kurdistan.
Iraq, Iran and Turkey all have faced rebellions by their Kurdish minorities. But Iraq is nonetheless backing the Iranian Kurds in an extension of its decades-old rivalry with Iran.
Iran backed Iraqi Kurds in their war against the government in Baghdad during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war. Syria aids Kurdish fighters in Turkey.
The KDP fighters, clearly with Iraqi consent, stepped up their attacks after their veteran leader, Abdul Rahman Qassemlou, was assassinated July 13 in Vienna.
His successor, Sa'eed Badal, said Qassemlou went to Vienna in response to an offer from Iran's President Hashemi Rafsanjani to negotiate an end to the Kurdish rebellion.
Badal said he believes Qassemlou was killed by agents of radical Iranian factions in an attempt to torpedo Rafsanjani's efforts to end the mountain war, a move that would have strengthened his credibility as a pragmatist.
Badal said the KDP has turned down an Iranian proposal to resume negotiations because "we no longer trust them."
The guerrillas, known as \o7 Peshmergas, \f7 or "those who face death," say hundreds of young Iranian Kurds have joined them in recent months.
