A top figure with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has said that members of the group met with the United States until 2004, a claim that a U.S. official quickly denied.
“There were some contacts in 2003-2004 with the United States,” Murat Karayılan, a PKK leader based in the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, said in an interview with daily Radikal that the paper published Friday in the second part of a multi-part story.
“His assertions are ridiculous. A terrorist leader who the United States has marked as a drug trafficker has no credibility,” an anonymous U.S. official told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Friday, noting that the United States has designated Karayılan as a “drug kingpin.”
In his interview with Radikal, Karayılan claimed the PKK had made contacts with the United States in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq. Though he stressed that the PKK was located in northern Iraq without anyone’s permission, he said the United States had to contact the group in order to enter the region.
“However, these contacts have not become a political relationship. We have had no contacts since 2004 due to the intervention and veto of the Turkish state,” Karayılan said, adding that the PKK members who made contact with the United States were no longer part of the group.
Karayılan blamed the United States and the European Union for creating the Kurdish problem in the region. “They created this problem and they make politics to continue it, since they have an interest in the Kurdish problem. They want to keep it as a trump card against Turkey,” he said. “If the problems here are solved, the people of the region will not need them anymore. They first create the problems and then maintain their economic and political hegemony by keeping those problems deadlocked.”

Karayılan also claimed that the United States had made contacts with the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK, which was included on the U.S. list of designated terrorist groups in 2009. The group, which has historical links to the PKK, operates mostly in Iran from bases in northern Iraq.
“We also had relations with Iran at those times. Iran asked us, ‘What is the PJAK?’ and wanted us to cut our ties with them,” he said. “The U.S. also pressured the PJAK to cut its ties with the PKK. The PJAK and the U.S. had meetings in Kirkuk. However, the PJAK rejected the idea of cutting its ties with the PKK. Those discussions were in 2005-2006.”
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
In 2009, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against three leading members of the PKK – Karayılan, Ali Rıza Altun and Zubeyir Aydar – and accused them of smuggling narcotics to help fund the outlawed group, which had already been listed by the U.S. government for terrorism and trafficking activities. The U.S. decision has frozen any assets the three men might have under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibited U.S. citizens from conducting financial or commercial transactions with them.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com