Members of the PKK guard a building in Iraq in April 2013. (The NYT)
The New York Times
Mar 1, 2025 08:00 IST First published on: Mar 1, 2025 at 08:00 IST
For more than four decades, Turkey has been fighting an armed insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a militant group that says it seeks greater rights for the country’s Kurdish minority.
Now, PKK’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, has called on Kurdish fighters to lay down their arms. However, it remains unclear how effective his plea will be and what, if anything, the Turkish government is offering the group in exchange for ending the fighting.
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Who are the PKK?
The group launched an armed insurgency against the Turkish state in the early 1980s, originally seeking independence for the Kurds, who are believed to make up about 15% or more of Turkey’s population.
Starting from the mountains in eastern and southern Turkey, PKK fighters attacked Turkish military bases and police stations, prompting harsh government responses. Later, the conflict spread to other parts of the country, with devastating PKK bombings in Turkish cities that killed many civilians.
In 1999, Turkey captured Ocalan and convicted him of leading an armed terrorist group. He received a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison.
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Since his incarceration, Ocalan has shifted its ideology away from secession and toward Kurdish rights inside Turkey.
Over the past decade, the Turkish military has routed PKK forces from major Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey.
Who are the Kurds?
The Kurds are an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people — there are widely varying estimates — concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
They speak multiple dialects of Kurdish, a language not directly related to Turkish or Arabic. Most are Sunni Muslims.
The Kurds were promised a nation of their own by world powers after World War I, but that was never granted. There were Kurdish rebellions in various countries over the following generations, and Kurds have faced state suppression of their language and culture.
In Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whose leaders have roots in the PKK and follow Ocalan’s ideology, controls the northeastern part of the country. They have been backed for years by the United States and played a crucial role in defeating the Islamic State group, but the fall of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad in December has left their future status unclear.
Since the 1991 Gulf War, the largely Kurdish northern region of Iraq has been semiautonomous.
How did previous peace efforts fare?
Multiple efforts to freeze or end the Turkey-PKK conflict have been made, starting with a ceasefire in 1993. But all of them collapsed.
Violence flared on and off until a new round of peace talks began in 2011. But the process collapsed in mid-2015, with each side blaming the other for the failure.
