Erdogan’s War and Peace with the Kurds

Last week, around 30 Kurdish fighters gathered alongside Iraqi and Turkish officials at a cave complex in the rugged mountains outside Sulaymaniyah, a city in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Dressed in olive green fatigues, they belonged to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been locked in a four decade long conflict with the Turkish state. But they weren’t there to fight. Their faces grave, they unclasped their war belts, unburdened their shoulders of AK-47 rifles, and placed their weapons in a bowl-shaped silver boiler.

Then, in an echo of the bonfires of Nowruz, the Persian and Kurdish New Year, which symbolize renewal, they set their weapons ablaze. “We destroy our weapons of our own free will as a decisive step toward the practical success of peace and a democratic society,” declared Bese Hozat, a top leader of the PKK.  The disarmament ceremony signaled an end to the armed conflict between the PKK and Turkey, one that  has killed around 40,000 militants, soldiers, and civilians since 1984. All told, the violence is estimated to have cost Turkey close to $2 trillion.

The ceremony came about after Abdullah Ocalan, the 77-year-old founder and leader of the PKK, who has been imprisoned on an island in the Marmara Sea since 1999, ordered the group to disband and end its armed struggle. It was a watershed moment, as Ocalan abandoned Kurdish demands for autonomy. The future for Kurdish politics, he signaled, was now within Turkey’s democratic framework.

Since then, the disarmament of the PKK has advanced remarkably smoothly. On Sunday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his ruling coalition will  “walk together” with pro-Kurdish lawmakers to pass legislation to complete the disarmament process. The language was striking. Erdogan and his nationalist allies have long demonized the pro-Kurdish parties as political wings of the PKK and accused them of supporting terrorism. Yet here they were, offering to work together with the Kurds. 

The disbanding of the PKK frees up Turkey from the burdens of an exhausting, expensive conflict and helps it focus on strengthening its position as a regional powerhouse. Making peace with the PKK—something no Turkish leader managed in four decades—is a singular achievement for Erdogan that is bound to further strengthen his powerful grip on Turkey.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Kurdish question

Before Erdogan led his AKP to power and took office as Prime Minister of Turkey in 2003, the two major socially and politically disenfranchised social groups in the country were the Kurds, and the conservative Muslims—who formed the political base for Erdogan’s party. And despite their politics, Turkey’s Kurds, by and large, are believing Muslims.

In the 1990s when the Turkish government fought a pitiless war against the PKK, banned Kurdish language, criminalized identifying as a Kurd, and depopulated thousands of Kurdish villages, Erdogan, a young politician, produced a report advocating for greater rights for the Kurds.

In 2005, two years after assuming office, Prime Minister Erdogan set out to address the Kurdish question. He believed resolving the Kurdish problem would free Turkey from a vicious conflict, save billions, and help it focus on becoming a regional power. Peace with Kurds would also help Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, and gain Erdogan electoral support from the Kurds, who form about one fifth of Turkey’s population. 

Erdogan lifted the ban on Kurdish language, allowed the Kurds to teach in their mother tongue, and set up radio and television networks to broadcast in Kurdish. In the late 2000s, Erdogan started secret talks with the PKK leadership in Oslo, in coordination with Ocalan, which faced sabotage and setbacks, but eventually led to a ceasefire by the PKK in 2013.

The civil war in Syria intensified in 2014 as the PKK was withdrawing its fighters from Turkey. Syrian Kurdish militias, which grew out of the PKK and revere its founder Ocalan, ran the autonomous Kurdish canton of Rojava near Turkey’s southeastern border. In the fall of 2014, Syrian Kurdish militias and PKK fighters were defending Kobane, a city in northeastern Syria, against the Islamic State. Turkey, which saw Rojava as a grave threat, whose existence intensified separatist dreams among its Kurds and served as a refuge for the PKK fighters, did nothing to support them. 

One of the core elements of his peace deal with the PKK was that the Kurdish political movement would support Erdogan’s effort to transform the Turkish government into a presidential system. Kobani soured the peace deal. Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of the pro-Kurdish party, who was championed by Turkish liberals and critics of Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism, denied him Kurdish support.

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Despite Turkish objections, in 2015, the Obama Administration partnered with the Syrian Kurdish militias, armed them, and instructed them to rebrand themselves as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to convey dissociation from the PKK. The partnership between the SDF and the Obama Administration to fight the Islamic State reduced the importance of a PKK peace deal with Turkey. 

The defeat of the Islamic State in Kobani—with significant American air support—energized the PKK, which started a campaign of urban warfare and tried to take over cities in southeastern Turkey. Months of brutal fighting followed. Erdogan continued a coordinated military strategy and a crackdown on Kurdish political activity, arresting Demirtas and removing and arresting mayors from pro-Kurdish parties after accusing them of supporting terrorism. 

In recent years, Turkey deployed advanced military technology—signal intelligence and armed drones—and sustained large-scale military operations and cornered the PKK in northern Iraq. The group lost most of its capacity to stage attacks in Turkey, was forced to take refuge in mountainous caves, and was stripped of operational freedom in mostly Kurdish southern Turkey.

The world after the war in Gaza

And then came the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. A year into the war on Gaza, Israel attacked and severely handicapped Hezbollah, until then seen as the most powerful actor in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, and tensions between Iran and Israel continued to rise. Turkey, which was critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, watched warily as Israel expanded its military operations and seemed keen to establish regional military domination. 

Ankara revealed its talks and the PKK founder in October 2024 in a dramatic call by Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the nationalist MHP and Erdogan’s coalition partner, inviting Ocalan to appear in the Turkish parliament and announce an end to armed struggle. Turkish officials, alarmed by potential Israeli courting of the Kurds, worried about the PKK and its affiliates finding a new patron and renewing conflict, redoubled their focus on talks with Ocalan.

Complicated political and personal histories were to affect the course of events favorably for Turkey. In the early 1980s, the first generation of Ocalan’s PKK fighters were trained by leftist Palestinian militants in Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and the PKK fought alongside the same Palestinian militants against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982. A meeting with politicians from DEM, the pro-Kurdish party, revealed how Ocalan had been thinking about the world after Gaza; the PKK founder insisted to his colleagues that he wouldn’t allow his group to be used as a proxy by Israel in what he saw as that nation’s quest for regional domination. 

The Syrian variable

Abdullah Ocalan spent around 20 years in Syria in the 1980s and 1990s laying the political, economic, and military foundations of the Kurdish nationalist movement. For Turkey, the most crucial aspect of any settlement with the PKK was tied to the SDF, a force of about 100,000 fighters controlling vast territories along the Turkish border. After the Obama Administration deployed U.S. troops in Syria to fight the Islamic State alongside the SDF, the presence of American troops prevented Turkey from moving against the Syrian Kurdish militia.

In December, Syrian rebels led by Ahmed Al-Sharaa and his insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Turkey advised and supported, toppled the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa’s government moved to try and unify Syria under a single government and military—a development that offered an opportunity to alleviate Turkish concerns about Kurdish separatism and improve the odds of its talks with the PKK.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia lobbied intensely with the United States and Europe on behalf of the new Syrian government and President Donald Trump removed sanctions on Al-Shaara’s former insurgent group to help rebuild a Syria free from Iranian influence and create conditions for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Washington supported Turkish peace talks with Ocalan and pushed the SDF to sign an agreement to join the new Syrian government and abandon demands for independence or autonomy, which alleviated many Turkish security concerns.

Tensions remain as the SDF leader Mazloum Abdi—Ocalan’s stepson and a former PKK fighter—continues to insist on a form of autonomy and retaining the SDF as a separate division within the Syrian army—a condition unacceptable to Damascus. The Trump administration is growing impatient with the SDF. Thomas Barrack, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and President Trump’s Special Envoy to Syria recently insisted that the United States supported the principle of one country, one nation, and one military in Syria.

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Eyes on the prizes

The end of the conflict with the PKK has already strengthened Ankara’s hand against regional rivals as it promises to heal its relationship with the Kurds. Turkey can focus on commercial projects, such as the ambitious Iraqi Development Road, which would connect it to the Persian Gulf through railways and highways, which were previously vulnerable to PKK attacks. Trade routes through Syria could open and war-ravaged towns and valleys might finally welcome investment and tourism. 

Of course, Erdogan is leveraging this significant achievement for his domestic political goals. He used his rapprochement with the PKK founder and the Kurdish political movement to limit Kurdish participation in protests following his March arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, the Istanbul Mayor, who had emerged as his most formidable rival. And in an echo of his disenfranchisement of Kurdish politicians, Turkish prosecutors arrested 16 mayors from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the leading opposition party, on charges of corruption and extortion.

And the Turkish president is trying to establish a transactional alliance with the pro-Kurdish DEM party, hoping to persuade it to support a new constitution—one that might partially appease Kurdish demands and allow Erdogan to seek presidential terms beyond his current two-term limit, which expires in 2028. He has promised the pro-Kurdish party acceptance as a legitimate political force, ending decades of persecution, and described its future as a “Turkey party.”