Three months ago, Shilan ran away from her family in Iran to walk across dangerous mountain passes in order to reach Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) camps at their hideouts in Iraq.

The 18-year-old said that after a neighbor in the Iranian city of Meriwan introduced her to the ideologically charged literature of the Turkish-Kurdish PKK guerrilla movement, she decided to join them to achieve "emancipation" and escape married life.

"I don't want to be controlled. In Iran you can't speak freely, a woman can't walk alone, you can't listen to music," the doe-eyed fighter said as she pushed long brown locks away from her face.

Dressed in a gray tunic, baggy pants and the PKK's trademark yellow sneakers, Shilan spoke with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over her shoulder as a fellow woman fighter leaned her weapon, a heavy machine gun, against a boulder to listen in.

"I like the military life. But I'm not here just for myself, I'm fighting for all of Kurdistan," she told AFP.

Joining the PKK, whose declared goals are to forge an independent Kurdistan out of the majority Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria through a "socialist democratic" revolution, is not without its restrictions.

Sexual relations among the atheist ranks are strictly forbidden, as is the consumption of alcohol, while members are required to cut links with the outside world and leave personal possessions behind.

"We are married to our cause. It's something that's very hard for an outsider to understand. We are here to fight," said fighter Qasim Engin.

"Those who can't live with this have to go back home," said Engin, a guerrilla with piercing eyes from Turkey's southeast and a veteran of 18 years spent fighting Turks, Iranians, Arabs and sometimes rival Kurdish factions.

"I don't regret that I won't have a family. If I got married in Iran I would be stuck in the same situation for the rest of my life," added Shilan.

The green, cloud blanketed valley houses one of an unknown number of camps that lace the valleys and mountain sides of an area where Iraq, Turkey and Iran meet.

Turkey says some 5,000 armed PKK militants have found refuge in northern Iraq, and the group is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

Despite recent tensions in the region, fighters were relaxed enough to take up a game of volleyball in between political lessons and mandatory readings from some of the dozens of books written by imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Ocalan is serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison.

Teenage recruit Dilbirin described the strictly regulated daily routine of a rebel in training.

The day begins at 4:45 am with sports, then breakfast, rest, political lessons, lunch, more political lectures, followed by political reading and radio broadcasts.

In a few weeks time, the recruits will move on to military training, he said.

The organization was founded as a political party in the 1970s by Ocalan and a handful of 'Havals', or comrades, but transformed itself into a guerrilla movement that initially targeted land-owning Kurds deemed to be "collaborating" with the Turkish authorities.

It has since taken on the Turkish army in a conflict that has claimed some 37,000 lives, most of them in majority-Kurd southeastern Anatolia, while the PKK has moved much of its fighting force to Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq since the 1980s.

They are respected and romanticized by ordinary Kurds for their dedication to their cause.

But some former rebels say that living by the PKK's unwritten rules can be a bitter experience.

"Everything is different there, even the ethics were different up there in the mountains," said Bawar, who spent six months in the PKK's ranks before making a nighttime escape across the Iraqi border into Iran in 1999.

"I don't regret my experience there, but they brainwashed me and shaped my personality. It's who I am today," said Bawar who now lives in Sulaimaniyah in Iraq. He joined the PKK when he was 17.

Bawar, who did not give his real name, said he never found the strength to cut all links with his family and when he expressed his desire to leave he was accused of being a spy.

"That made me fear for my life because during the lectures they always said that those who retreated from battle or spied on the PKK would be found..."

Eventually, he made his getaway into the mountains after telling a night watchman he needed to relieve himself.

"Now I believe that the ideas of the PKK don't fit with my views. I have a different life, with a family."