The peace process initiated at the beginning of the year towards a ‘Turkey free of terrorism’ took a new step on Sunday, after the terrorist group PKK announced its complete withdrawal from Turkey, transferring all the forces it still had on Turkish territory to its bases in the mountains of northern Iraq.
According to Turkish newspapers such as Milliyet, the armed organisation stated in a communiqué that the decision to withdraw from Türkiye is part of the peace initiative launched following the historic appeal by Abdullah Öcalan in February this year, which was followed by a unilateral declaration of a ceasefire in early March.
During a ceremony held yesterday in Iraq, several of the members who left Turkey participated in an event in which a senior PKK official, Sabri Ok, confirmed that the withdrawal had been approved by the organisation’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Ok also said that the armed group expected “certain political and legal gestures” in exchange for this step, whereby a total of 25 PKK members, eight of them women, crossed the border and left Turkey, according to images released by the group itself.
From Ankara, the Turkish government welcomed the move as a “tangible step forward” towards ending one of the region’s longest-running conflicts. The spokesman for Erdoğan’s AKP party, Ömer Çelik, described the PKK’s decision as a concrete result of the progress being made in the roadmap towards a Turkey free of terrorism, and stressed that the ultimate goal remains the dissolution and disarmament of all illegal armed groups operating in the region, including Iraq and Syria, in reference to the Syrian arm of the PKK, the YPG.
This new step comes after several months of signs of detente between Türkiye and the terrorist group, which since 1984 began armed struggle to achieve its political objectives, unleashing a conflict with the Turkish state that has caused more than 40,000 deaths. Öcalan himself, in his first video message in 26 years, made from the Turkish prison of İmralı where he is serving a life sentence, had called in July for the “swift disarmament” of the PKK. A few days later, the group began its ‘historic’ surrender of weapons with a pompous ceremony held in northern Iraq, in what was seen by Turkey as the first visible gesture towards the definitive disappearance of the terrorist organisation.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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