With the Kurdish Guerillas

Beritan was a seventeen-year-old Kurdish girl with a wide grin and a big gun. It wasn’t the gun that worried me so much as the grenades—two strapped to a cartridge belt around her waist. I had visions of an accidental explosion, and I kept inching away each time she plopped down next to me for a chat.

But there really wasn’t anywhere else to go. All around me were armed guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), the separatist group battling the Turkish army for c...