tity.The Ideologies of the Turkish and Kurdish societies contribute towards the better understanding of the origin of the Turkey-Kurds conflict. On the international or macro level, Kurds are distributed between Iraq, Iran, Syria, America and the former U.S.S.R and are minorities in all the countries in which they have been living for years. In Iran, Iraq and Syria Kurds have PKK bases. A closer analysis of these states indicates, however, that Syria has given the PKK by far the most overt support, while Iraq at least has made the most attempts to cooperate with the Turks, even giving Turkey carte blanche permission to pursue the PKK into northern Iraq on four different occasions since 1983. Iran's role in this matter has fallen somewhere in between these two extremes. Syria has provided a heaven for Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, since before the Turkish coup of 1980. After this event the Syrians permitted the remnants of the PKK to reassemble and reconstitute themselves on their territory and in the parts of Lebanon they controlled. The first three PKK "congresses" also took place there. Until his arrest in 1999, Ocalan continued to live in Damascus. This situation of coalition between Syria and the PKK reflects a set of mutual expectations among them. The Kurds are getting security and support from the Syrians while the Syrians are concerned with the waters of the Euphrates River, which first flows through Turkey before reaching Syria. Finally, acting cooperatively and displaying common behavior and attitudes toward Turkey enabled the PKK, which is relatively less powerful then Turkey, to resist the Turkish government. The three levels of analysis that were presented above are complimentary and all contribute towards simplifying and understanding, from a different perspective, the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds.In my opinion, the most important level of analysis that could be used in understanding the conf...
