A Saladin-type unifier is emerging in the Kurdish Mideast who could prove far more destabilizing than Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Although unknown to Americans, Ocalan is the rising force in northern Iraq and his influence is even frightening Iran's mullahs. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, has lived and studied in the Middle East and reads widely in the Arab press.

His name is barely mentioned in accounts of why the U.S. launched cruise missile attacks on Saddam Hussein's military bases. But Abdullah Ocalan is creating waves that are destabilizing the Middle East far more than the Iraqi dictator.

Ocalan is the leader of the Maoist-inspired Kurdistan Workers Party -- called the PKK -- which has waged a decade-long guerrilla war in Turkey and is now viewed by many observers as the rising power in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq. Ocalan (pronounced Oj-hah-lan) just may be the transnational leader the region has been looking for -- and fearing -- for decades.

Roughly 20 million Kurds inhabit the region stretching from eastern Turkey through northern Iraq into Iran, Syria and the Caucasus. Rarely throughout their three-thousand year history as a nation have they been able to form a state of their own. Yet they have fiercely resisted every attempt to destroy or assimilate them.

At the same time Kurds have long believed that they are destined for greatness as a people. Their national pride runs deep but so also does their sense of transnational mission. The greatest Kurd in history -- Saladin -- destroyed the Crusader states in the Holy Land, unified Arabs, Turks and Kurds, and paved the way for the Ottoman Empire's 500-year rule.

Could Ocalan become a modern-day Saladin? Expectations are rising rapidly in the region even as popular disdain deepens for the two quarreling Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Yet these are the two factional leaders on whom the Clinton administration has pinned its hopes for stabilizing Kurdistan and containing Saddam Hussein through the no-fly zone.

A year ago the U.S. sponsored a summit between the two big Kurdish leaders in Dublin which flopped. A second summit, scheduled for last month, never got off the ground because neither factional leader would attend. In fact, U.S. policy was doomed from the start because it assumed far too much power in the hands of these two factions while underestimating that of the PKK.

Today Ocalan holds together the biggest guerrilla insurgency in the world today. Every day the Turkish press carries reports of police or military posts attacked by PKK units. Two months ago a young PKK woman concealing a bomb in her dress walked into a solemn military observance and blew up 30 soldiers along with herself. The Turkish political prisoners who recently staged mass hunger strikes were largely PKK members.

But Ocalan's influence reaches far beyond Turkey. Last year, the PKK demolished 24 of Barzani's military outposts in northern Iraq. Seeing his power seeping away, Barzani turned to the only other leader able to help him -- Saddam Hussein. Saddam obliged by attacking Talabani's stronghold Arbil, prompting U.S. retaliatory missile attacks.

Even the Iranian mullahs who preached an Islamic message similar to Mao's early on in their revolution are now fearful that Ocalan's message could spill over into Iran. Indeed, the Iranian opposition movement, Mujahideen-i-Khalq, "Martyrs of the People," based in eastern Iraq.

At the core of Ocalan's appeal is the fact that he, alone among Kurdish leaders, understands that a social revolution is going on in Kurdish society everywhere. Kurds feel not only oppressed by their alien rulers but also by one of the most rigid feudal social systems still in existence. The message of Maoism has always been to empower the poor and fight their oppressors. Like Mao, the PKK teaches to its adherents living with the people, gender equality, a willingness to sacrifice one's life for the cause of the people.

In addition to a Maoist tilt to the poor, Ocalan also accepts the Islamic religious beliefs of the Kurds, in contrast to classic Marxist movements which have denounced religion as an opiate of the people. "Religion has always existed and it always will," he has said, describing it as a source of morality vital for movements like the PKK. He attributes the collapse of socialism to its failure to deal with the question of religion.

The PKK is not the only revolutionary force in the Middle East shaking establishments. An Islamic revival has been sweeping over Turkey resulting in the first Muslim prime minister since the formation of the modern secular Turkish republic. Muslims preach that their common faith crosses all boundaries of nationality, race and class. The Maoists agree on the first two but not the third. And Marxist ideas of class struggle have given them an organized militancy which the Islamic movements generally lack. The fact is Maoists, like other Marxist movements, know how to make war while Islamists don't.

If these two forces -- Islam and Maoist ideology -- should coalesce, the region is likely to see a new transnational empire arising which no amount of high-tech weaponry from the West can thwart. And Ocalan could go down in the history books as the Saladin of the late 20th century.