Turkey and the PKK

For forty years the Turkish state fought the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, in the mountains of the south-east and across the border in Iraq and Syria. About forty thousand people were killed, most of them Kurds. In 2025 the PKK's imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan, told it to lay down its arms and dissolve, and it said it would. In August 2026 parliament passed the law that sets the terms for its fighters' return. What the fifteen million or more Kurds of Turkey receive in exchange has not been said.

Turkey's wider position and each side's full account: Turkey's independent course.

Where it stands · September 2026

On 7 September the PKK warned that the disarmament process could stall without political reforms. The warning sets a condition on the process that began with the call to dissolve the organisation and disarm, and that the parliamentary commission is to carry forward.

What the dispute is about

What ends and what begins. The state calls the process a Turkey free of terror: an organisation disarms, and its members are dealt with by law. The Kurdish side calls it peace and a democratic society: arms are laid down in exchange for rights. The law that passed uses the first language only.

Rights. Education in Kurdish, local self-government, the release of jailed politicians, a constitution that does not define every citizen as a Turk. None is in the law.

Ocalan. He has been held on an island prison since 1999 and is the only person the fighters obey. His conditions, and whether he will ever be freed, are negotiated out of sight.

How each side explains it

The state's account

The PKK is a terrorist organisation that killed soldiers, teachers, village guards and civilians for forty years, and is listed as such by Turkey's allies. It has been defeated: by drones, by operations in Iraq, by the end of its Syrian offshoot's army. Turkey is ending it on Turkey's terms and generously, with a path home for those who did not kill. Kurds are equal citizens; they sit in parliament, in the cabinet and in the governing party. There was never a Kurdish problem, only a terror problem, and it is closing.

In our coverage

Turkey is a legitimate independent middle power and broker →29 headlines
Covered by:Daily Sabah · Anadolu Agency · TRT World

The account of the PKK and the Kurdish party

Kurds were told for seventy years that they did not exist. Their language was banned, their villages burned, their elected mayors replaced by officials and their politicians jailed. The armed struggle was the answer to that, and it is ending because Ocalan judged that politics can now achieve more. The movement has done its part: it declared a ceasefire, dissolved and burned its weapons. The state has passed a pardon and nothing else. Without legal guarantees the process is a surrender, and surrenders do not last.

In our coverage

What each account leaves out

The state's leaves out that it denied the existence of Kurds by law and banned their language until 1991; that its forces emptied and burned some three thousand villages in the 1990s, as Europe's human rights court found in case after case; and that the leader of the Kurdish party has been in prison since 2016 in defiance of that court.

The PKK's and the Kurdish party's leaves out that the PKK killed Kurdish civilians, teachers and rivals as well as soldiers; that it financed itself in Europe through extortion and drugs, according to European police; and that in 2015 it carried the war into Kurdish cities, whose centres were destroyed.

The opposition's leaves out that the offer to Ocalan came first from the head of the nationalist party itself, and that it proposes no alternative except a war that forty years did not win.

The ledger

The Turkish state

Wanted: the PKK gone without concessions that look like concessions.
Gained: its dissolution, and the end of its Syrian army.
Paid: so far, a pardon.

The PKK

Wanted: once a state, then autonomy, now legal politics and its founder's freedom.
Gained: a way out for its fighters.
Paid: its arms, before knowing the price.

Turkey's Kurds

Wanted: an end to the war, and recognition.
Gained

Words in dispute

Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.

terror-free Turkey / peace process
terrorist organisation / guerrilla movement
the Kurdish question / the terror problem
amnesty / surrender
founding leader / baby killer, of Ocalan
trustee

Events per week

Per-week distribution of events. Click a bar to see that week's top events.

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Week of Sep 28, 2026(1)

Erdoğan calls for ‘grand consensus’ amid terror-free Türkiye success

1 sourcesOct 1, 2026