The Kurdistan Employees’ Celebration (PKK) introduced on Monday that it’ll disband and disarm following its greater than four-decade insurgency in opposition to the Turkish state that has resulted within the deaths of over 40,000 folks by the hands of PKK militants and Turkey’s army.
The PKK has sought to create an unbiased Kurdish state on Turkish soil, the place the Kurds make up some 20% of Turkey’s 86 million inhabitants. The U.S., the European Union and Turkey have categorised the PKK as a terrorist group.
In its assertion, the PKK mentioned, according to a Reuters report, it “has accomplished its historic mission,” which over time shifted to in search of better Kurdish rights and restricted autonomy in southeast Turkey, moderately than an unbiased state.
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Supporters cheer President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at an election rally in Ankara, Turkey, on June 5, 2015.
“The PKK wrestle has damaged the coverage of denial and annihilation of our folks and introduced the Kurdish challenge to some extent of fixing it by democratic politics,” it mentioned on the Firat information web site, which confirmed photos of senior PKK members attending the congress in fighter fatigues.
Turkey will take essential measures to make sure clean progress towards a “terror-free” nation after the PKK determination, mentioned Turkey’s presidential communications director, Fahrettin Altun.
The dissolution of the PKK raises a number of questions for the Islamist authorities of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the pro-American Kurdish forces (YPG) in northern Syrian who helped defeat the Islamist State terrorist motion. Turkey considers the YPG an affiliate of the PKK and has repeatedly launched army strikes in opposition to Syrian Kurds.
A girl waves a flag bearing an image of the founding father of the Kurdistan Employees’ Celebration, Abdullah Ocalan, as folks collect within the Kurdish-majority metropolis of Qamishli in northeastern Syria on Feb. 27, 2025. (Delil Souleiman/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
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The jailed PKK chief Abdullah Ocalan, who has been held on an island south of Istanbul since 1999, urged in February that the PKK disband.
Individually, Mazloum Abdi, the pro-American commander in chief of Syrian Kurdish fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which ousted the Islamic State, mentioned Ocalan’s name didn’t apply to his group. The YPG is a part of the bigger umbrella group, the SDF, and isn’t related to the PKK.
Individuals depart the realm after an explosion on Istanbul’s in style pedestrian Istiklal Avenue, Nov. 13, 2022. (Ismail Coskun/IHA by way of AP)
The U.S. and the EU are allied with the SDF and the YPG within the battle in opposition to Islamist terrorism in Syria and, in distinction to Turkey, don’t see an affiliation between the SDF, YPG and the PKK.
Fox Information Digital has reported over the years on Turkey’s efforts to wipe out pro-U.S. Syrian Kurdish forces (SDF and YPG) who performed a key function within the dismantlement of the Islamic State.
Syrian Democratic Forces fighters experience atop army autos as they have fun victory in Raqqa, Syria, Oct. 17, 2017. (Reuters/Erik De Castro)
In December, after former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad fled to Russia and his regime collapsed, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., declared repeatedly in an handle to Erdoğan in Congress, “Go away the Kurds alone.” He added, “The Kurds are America’s buddies… The folks most liable for serving to us, most liable for destroying ISIS, have been the Kurds.”
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The Kurds are among the many largest stateless ethnic groups on this planet, with some 30 million concentrated in an space straddling Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. A minority in all 4 international locations, the Kurds communicate their very own language, with a number of dialects. Most are Sunni Muslims.
