The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist terror group that has been fighting a violent insurgency against the Turkish government since 1984, announced a unilateral ceasefire on Saturday.
The announcement came in response to a letter written by jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan last Thursday, in which he asked the separatist group to disarm and disband.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility of this call,” Ocalan said in the letter, which he presented to a delegation from the pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy (DEM) party.
“All groups must lay down their arms and PKK must dissolve itself,” he declared.
“We declare a ceasefire effective today to pave the way for the implementation of Leader Apo’s call for peace and democratic society. None of our forces will take armed action unless attacked,” the PKK said within a matter of hours, referring to Ocalan by his nickname “Apo.”
The PKK said that “democratic politics and legal grounds must also be suitable” for the ceasefire to hold up. As part of that process, the group asked Turkey to release Ocalan from jail so he could “personally direct and execute” disarmament and reconciliation. Turkish officials close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been hinting that Ocalan might be paroled if the PKK agreed to lay down its arms.
The DEM representatives were visiting Ocalan at the island prison of Imrali, where he has been living in solitary confinement since 1999. They brought his letter back to Istanbul and read it aloud to a cheering crowd of DEM supporters.
The PKK was originally founded as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group in the 1970s, with Ocalan as one of the founders. PKK operatives received paramilitary training from Palestinian militants in Lebanon and developed bases of operation in northern Iraq and Syria, across a region that would have become part of a hypothetical “Greater Kurdistan” if the separatists got their way.
Ocalan, who is now 75 years old, was a trained left-wing student activist from a Turkish-Kurdish peasant family. He was jailed during his years at Ankara University for organizing protests and distributing leftist propaganda. The manifesto he co-wrote in 1977 to found the PKK, titled “The National Road to Kurdish Revolution,” sparked unrest that prompted him to flee to safety in Syria in 1979.
For years, Ocalan recruited and trained PKK operatives in Syria, eventually prompting the Turkish government to complain that Syria was indulging far too many Kurdish paramilitary camps on its territory — a dynamic that continues to the present day, with constant Turkish complaints that all Syrian Kurdish militia groups are allied with PKK terrorists. Turkey also sporadically bombs PKK positions in northern Iraq that date back to the group’s origins in the 1970s.
The PKK insurgency formally began in August 1984 with guerrilla attacks on Turkish military posts in the southeastern provinces of Siirt and Semdinli, with several fatalities. Kurdish separatists welcomed these actions as brave resistance strikes against Turkish forces occupying Kurdish land, while the Turks denounced them as criminal acts of terrorism.
Under Ocalan’s leadership, PKK attacks escalated in scale and bloodshed over the next 15 years, and the targets were by no means limited to Turkish military units. A particularly bloody series of attacks occurred in Turkish villages in 1987, with dozens of women and children among the victims. Unrest increased after the 1991 Gulf War, as Iraqi forces cracked down on their Kurdish population, driving many of them into Turkey and Iran.
The United States designated the PKK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 1997. The U.S. government has also sanctioned the PKK as a drug trafficking organization, since heroin smuggling provided much of the PKK’s income.
The PKK declared its first ceasefire in 1999 after Ocalan — a hunted fugitive bouncing across the world after Ankara pressured Damascus into kicking him out of Syria — was captured during an undercover Turkish security operation in Kenya. The operation was controversially assisted by the CIA and the government of Greece, which booted Ocalan out of its embassy in Nairobi and exposed him to capture by Turkish commandos.
“We always said that our state would capture him wherever he may be. We kept our promise,” boasted then-Turkish Prime Minister Buletn Ecevit. “Abdullah Ocalan, who has been shut out of every place in the world, found himself in the arms of Turkey in the end.”
The Turks were optimistic that Ocalan’s arrest would put the PKK out of business, but the insurgency resumed in 2004. Another pause in 2009 ended in 2011 when secret peace talks between Turkish officials and PKK leaders collapsed. Ocalan called another ceasefire in 2013 after the Turkish government began negotiating with him directly, but that relatively peaceable interlude ended with fresh attacks in the summer of 2015.
The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in December appears to have set the stage for the new cessation of hostilities, as the new Syrian government appears sympathetic to Turkey’s demands for security against Kurdish militias — and distinctly unsympathetic to Syrian Kurds. Kurdish-led groups like the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are distancing themselves from the PKK as they seek influence in the new Syrian government.
Another shifting factor in the PKK saga is Erdogan’s political situation. He has been cracking down on the DEM party with a string of arrests, reducing Kurdish influence in Turkish politics, even though the Kurds are the largest minority population in Turkey, and DEM is the third-largest party in parliament.
On the other hand, Erdogan wants to change the Turkish constitution — prominently including a change that would let him run for another term in 2028 — and he will need support from the DEM party. Erdogan’s carrot-and-stick approach for winning over the DEMs appears to involve beating them with a stick that has a carrot tied to it, but since the DEMs were willing to act as his intermediary with Ocalan and the PKK, it might just be working.
Erdogan did not immediately reciprocate Ocalan’s ceasefire declaration.
“We will continue our ongoing operations, if necessary, until we eliminate the last terrorist without leaving a single stone on top of another, without leaving a single head on his shoulder,” the Turkish president said at a dinner in Istanbul on Saturday.
The Trump administration applauded Ocalan’s ceasefire declaration as a “significant development” that would hopefully “assuage our Turkish allies about U.S. counter-ISIS partners in northeast Syria,” meaning the Kurdish-led SDF and YPG militia.
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