Book
Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence
London and New York, 2009, 363 p.
The Kurds, who number some 28 million people in the Middle East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored by the West, Kurds are now highly visible actors on the world's political stage. More than half live in Turkey, where the Kurdish struggle has gained new strength and attention since the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.
Blood and Belief combines reportage and scholarship to give the first in-depth account of the PKK. Aliza Marcus, one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote about their war for many years for a variety of prominent publications before being put on trial in Turkey for her reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their supporters and opponents throughout the world - including the Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break them up - Marcus provides an in-depth account of this influential radical group.