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A Kurdish militia has declared a ceasefire in its 40-year insurgency against Turkey after its imprisoned leader called for the group to disarm and dissolve earlier this week.
“We are declaring a ceasefire to be effective from today on. None of our forces will take armed action unless attacked,” the executive committee of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) said in a statement.
The announcement followed a call from the jailed PKK founding member Abdullah Öcalan earlier this week, signalling a desire to end an armed insurgency that has lasted for more than 40 years across south-eastern Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq and into neighbouring Iran. Öcalan, 75, has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since being captured by Turkish security forces in Kenya in 1999.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,” he said in a letter read out to a jubilant crowd of allies in Istanbul. “All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”
The announcement rippled across the Middle East, and may affect an array of Kurdish militia groups with long-held but varied ties to the PKK. The group, which is classified as terrorist in Turkey, the US and the UK, called Öcalan’s announcement part of “a new historic process” for the Middle East.
The group’s executive committee also called for Öcalan to be freed from his island prison, in order to “personally direct” a meeting that would prompt them to lay down their weapons. “In order for this to happen, a suitable security environment must be created,” it said.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, also called Öcalan’s message the start of a new phase for peace efforts, although his government has publicly rebuffed suggestions that Öcalan’s call could be followed by peace talks.
“There is an opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror that has stood between [the Turkish and Kurdish people’s] 1,000-year-old brotherhood,” he said.
Erdoğan’s administration has instead sought a unilateral ceasefire from the PKK, after his rightwing nationalist coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, suggested last October in the Turkish parliament that Öcalan could be granted a form of parole if the group were to lay down its arms and disband.
An earlier ceasefire between the PKK and Ankara broke down in 2015, prompting a period of violent attacks and reprisals across northern Iraq, Turkey and Syria that claimed thousands of lives. The International Crisis Group estimates that 7,152 people have since been killed in clashes or terror attacks in Turkey and northern Iraq, including 646 civilians, 1,494 members of the Turkish security forces and 4,786 militants.
The PKK executive committee said it agreed with the contents of Öcalan’s call, adding that “we will fully comply with and implement the requirements of the call on our part”. Even so, the group echoed the statements of Kurdish politicians, campaigners and leaders in adding that “democratic politics and legal grounds must also be secured for its success”.
Amid months of shuttle negotiations involving Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party before Öcalan’s announcement, Turkish authorities arrested dozens of its members.
In a series of dawn raids across 51 Turkish cities last month, Turkish forces detained at least 282 people including members of DEM, journalists and academics. The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, accused those arrested of being “suspected members of a terrorist organisation”, later mentioning the PKK.
Despite the wave of arrests, some observers believe Erdoğan and his allies could seek the group’s support for constitutional changes to allow him to remain in power.
“There will be a series of meetings next week, including state officials and politicians, and many things will become clearer and more concrete. We hope that everything will be arranged in the next three months,” said Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a member of DEM who visited Öcalan in prison and brought his letter back to Istanbul.
Öcalan’s announcement has the potential to affect Kurdish-led forces in north-eastern Syria that are negotiating their future position with Damascus, as well as battling Turkish-backed militias in the area.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed coalition of militia groups that has fought Islamic State militants in Syria for a decade, are under increasing pressure from Damascus and Ankara despite their efforts to remain in control of swaths of north-eastern Syria including two major cities.
The group said Turkish forces conducted airstrikes and bombardments near the Tishrin dam, a frequent flashpoint of conflict between the SDF and Turkish-backed militias since the overthrow of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last December.
Gen Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the SDF, said earlier this week that Öcalan had written and informed him about the call to disarm before the announcement.
While he hoped the PKK’s disarmament would quell Turkish airstrikes on territory that the SDF controls, he said, “to be clear, this only concerns the PKK and is nothing related to us here in Syria”.
Ziya Meral, a lecturer in diplomatic studies at Soas in London, and an expert on Turkish affairs, said the broader geopolitical context for the PKK today was different from the initial peace process in 2015, creating greater incentives for the group to explore talks with Ankara.
“From 2018 until now, Turkish security operations have really suffocated the PKK’s operational space, and this has expanded to Syria and Iraq,” said Meral, adding that in 2015, the PKK and its aligned group in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, felt more emboldened as they were a key partner for the US in the fight against Isis.
“Today Bashar al-Assad a former ally of the PKK is now gone in Syria and pressure is growing for the SDF to disband too, so a change in approach was needed.”
