ABSTRACT
The concurrence of two ideational factors, ethnicity and a radical leftist ideology, constitutes the second caveat to common ethnicity as the determining variable for categorizing their relations and to the ethnic alliance model serving as an applicable explanatory framework. It seems that when analysing the relations between the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK) and the Iraqi Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties and the matrix of identities and interests that constitutes these relations, for this particular episode and for the timeframe under consideration, materialist/strategic interests appear to outweigh ideational factors in determining both parties' decision making. One of the eminent authorities on the PKK in the 1980s, the Turkish journalist Ismet Imset, for example, states unequivocally, 'in fact, there was no major cooperation between the PKK and the Iraqi Kurds until 1983'. The PKK had entrenched itself in several camps in Iraqi Kurdistan under its exclusive control, and there was precious little the Kurdistan Democratic Party could do about it.
