For more than four decades, Turkey has been fighting an armed insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., a militant group that says it seeks greater rights for the country’s Kurdish minority.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict, in both P.K.K. attacks on military and civilian targets, and Turkish military operations against the militants and the communities that harbor them. Turkey, the United States and other countries consider the group a terrorist organization.
Now, the group’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, has called on Kurdish fighters to lay down their arms — although it remains unclear how effective his plea will be and what, if anything, the Turkish government is offering the group in exchange for ending the fighting.
Here is what to know about the P.K.K. and its conflict with Turkey.
Who are the P.K.K.?
The group launched an armed insurgency against the Turkish state in the early 1980s, originally seeking independence for the Kurds, who are believed to make up about 15 percent or more of Turkey’s population.
Starting from the mountains in eastern and southern Turkey, P.K.K. fighters attacked Turkish military bases and police stations, prompting harsh government responses. Later, the conflict spread to other parts of the country, with devastating P.K.K. bombings in Turkish cities that killed many civilians.
In 1999, Turkey captured Mr. Ocalan convicted him of leading an armed terrorist organization. He received a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison. He remains revered by the group’s members.
Since his incarceration, Mr. Ocalan has shifted its ideology away from secession and toward Kurdish rights inside Turkey.
Over the last decade, the Turkish military has routed P.K.K. forces from major Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey, while using drones to kill its leaders and fighters, hindering its ability to organize and carry out attacks.
The conflict has been on a low boil for years, although occasional P.K.K. attacks have revived fears of a wider conflict. Last year, a small squad of its militants stormed into the headquarters of a state-run aerospace company armed with rifles and explosives and killed five employees before the security forces regained control.
Who are the Kurds?
The Kurds are an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people — there are widely varying estimates — concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
They speak multiple dialects of Kurdish, a language not directly related to Turkish or Arabic. Most are Sunni Muslims.
The Kurds were promised a nation of their own by world powers after World War I, but that was never granted. There were Kurdish rebellions in various countries over the following generations, and Kurds have faced state suppression of their language and culture.
In Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whose leaders have roots in the P.K.K. and follow Mr. Ocalan’s ideology, controls the northeastern part of the country. They have been backed for years by the United States and played a crucial role in defeating the Islamic State, but the fall of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad in December has left their future status unclear. They are clashing with Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, and remain outside of the control of the new Syrian government in Damascus.
Since the 1991 Gulf War, the largely Kurdish northern region of Iraq has been semiautonomous. The P.K.K. leadership is now based in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. In recent years, Turkey has attacked the group and affiliated militias in Iraq and Syria while lobbying the Iraqi government to expel it.
How did previous peace efforts fare?
Multiple efforts to freeze or end the Turkey-P.K.K. conflict have been made, starting with a cease-fire in 1993. But all of them collapsed, often leading to greater bloodshed.
Violence flared on and off until a new round of peace talks began in 2011. At that time, Turkish intelligence officers met with Mr. Ocalan in prison to map out a plan for his fighters to disarm, and Kurdish politicians ferried messages between him and his associates in northern Iraq.
But the process collapsed in mid-2015, with each side blaming the other for the failure. One of the conflict’s most deadly phases followed, with pitched battles in cities in Turkey’s southeast that killed more than 7,000 people, according to the International Crisis Group.
Will this time be different?
Although Turkey still considers the P.K.K. a separatist terrorist group that does not represent the Kurdish people, it has acknowledged some historic violations of Kurdish rights and widened the margins for Kurdish language and culture.
It has licensed Kurdish-language television and radio broadcasts and allowed Kurdish language as an elective course in some schools.
At the same time, however, the government has removed more than 150 elected Kurdish mayors from their posts since 2015, according to the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party, which represents the pro-Kurdish movement politically and has seats in Parliament.
Most of the removed mayors were accused, and some convicted, of crimes related to the P.K.K.
Human Rights Watch has called the removal of Kurdish mayors politically motivated and a violation of voters’ rights.
The post What to Know About the Turkey-P.K.K. Conflict appeared first on New York Times.
