Video: A rare look inside the Kurdish rebel movement

Some, such as the United States and the European Union, see them as terrorists, others as saviours. PKK fighters are waging a war on two fronts, between Turkey and Iraq. FRANCE 24 was able to meet several members of the group in their stronghold of the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq.

For the past three decades, the PKK, Turkey's Kurdish guerrilla, has been at war with the Turkish regime, currently ruled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After a three-year truce, the conflict flared up again in the summer of 2015, when the Turkish army launched an intensive bombing campaign against PKK targets.

More recently, the PKK has been at war with Islamic State group jihadists, in particular in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, just like the peshmerga soldiers, the Iraqi Kurdish forces.

FRANCE 24’s reporters followed the Kurdish fighters from base to base across Iraq to see first-hand how they live on the front lines, how they train and how they prepare to fight. In this 26-minute documentary, our journalists describe a guerrilla movement with Marxist principles, which lets women play a key role and pursues only one goal: autonomy for all Kurds.