Adib Kawa, a former peshmerga who fought Saddam's army and is now a local politician in the Kurdish town of Rania not far from the mountains, said Turkish soldiers would "never" be able to flush out the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

"Saddam's soldiers were hunting for us. They bombed us. They mounted hundreds of offensives, but they failed," said Kawa, who hid in the Qandil for a whole decade between 1981 and 1991 to escape Saddam's forces.

"The valleys are so narrow with thick forests that we hardly ever needed a cave to escape from their helicopters and if they came on foot, they suffered huge losses. They used to retreat," he said.

The massive mountain range, between 120 and 150 kilometres (75 and 90 miles) north of the regional capital Arbil, stretches from the tip of southeastern Turkey along the border with Iran.

It is a place described by Iraqis as a natural fortress with its tall peaks, deep valleys and forests that make the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare.

The Iraqi army is not deployed in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north and access to the area is controlled by peshmerga fighters loyal to the regional government.

Kawa scoffed at the threats of military action emanating from Ankara following a series of deadly PKK attacks against the Turkish army in recent weeks.

"The PKK men are stronger than we were. They are very disciplined and their hideouts, some even underground, are formidable. The Turks can't do much to disturb them," he said.

In 1992, the Iraqi Kurds, still reeling from the offensive by Saddam's forces that followed the Gulf war the previous year, backed Turkish troops in an offensive against the PKK. Kawa was one of the peshmerga involved.

"Whenever we came near them, they disappeared like ghosts," he recalled.

"You can capture one of their positions, but it will be empty and you never have enough men to retain it."

He remembered searching caves that had been transformed into warehouses loaded with ammunition and food, carefully packed in plastic bags.

"They are seasoned, trained and fast," Kawa said of the PKK fighters. "Even with little bread, rice and tea, they can survive for months. And as they pay well, there will always be smugglers to provide them with supplies from Iran or Turkey or here."

Another former peshmerga, Mohammad Abdullah, 38, carrying a pistol in his belt and hugely built, also swears by the impregnable Qandil range.

For five years, he hid out in the mountains which he dubs "the Kurdish Tora Bora," in reference to the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda fighters eluded US troops and their Afghan allies.

"Nobody ever in the history of the world has conquered these mountains. If you know the Panjshir valley of (Afghan guerrilla leader) Ahmad Shah Massoud, then Qandil is even more difficult to attack."

Massoud was eventually killed by Al-Qaeda in 2001 but for years he held out against Russian troops in his valley stronghold north of Kabul.

Abdullah even brushed off Washington's assurances to Ankara that it would provide Turkey with real-time intelligence on the rebels, expected to be largely images taken by drones.

"Do the Americans have cameras that see what is under the trees?" he asks with a smile on his broad, hard face.

Abdullah said that the fact that mountains lie where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet would also play into the hands of the PKK.

"When the pressure of Saddam used to be high or when he used chemical weapons, we used to run into Turkey or Iran. The PKK will do the same," he said.

"They just have to stay there for a month and anyway they have supporters there."

Abdullah agrees with Iraqi Kurdish leaders that the solution to the crisis lied in political dialogue rather than military action.

"You think the Turkish army does not know this? They have launched 20 offensives and always failed," he said referring to Ankara's 23-year war against the PKK.

"It will be the same again," he added.