Why Abdullah Ocalan’s call to disarm the PKK will have ramifications across the region

Speculation has been rife in Turkey for weeks about an anticipated statement from the jailed leader of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). What would Abdullah Ocalan say? When would he say it? How would it be delivered?

The wait ended on Thursday afternoon, when Mr Ocalan – often known as “Apo” – ordered PKK fighters to disarm and the group to dissolve itself. The message was read out by officials from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (Dem Party), to a packed conference hall in an Istanbul hotel after a delegation had visited Mr Ocalan in prison. He has been serving a life sentence on a remote island in the Sea of Marmara since 1999.

Mr Ocalan’s call is an enormous development. He seems tired of the grinding armed struggle against the Turkish state by the militant group he founded more than 40 years ago, and appears instead to be calling on Kurds to enter a political process.

“Democratic consensus is the fundamental way,” Mr Ocalan said in his statement. It was an apparent call to both the PKK to end its armed struggle, but also to Turkey, to ensure democratic freedoms are not curbed in the nation of 85 million people, about 18 per cent of whom are ethnically Kurdish.

PKK-affiliated militias in Syria have now been pushed into a corner and face demands to integrate into the Damascus-controlled military. Many officials in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region also reject the PKK’s headquarters in the Qandil mountains there. If all PKK factions heed Mr Ocalan’s order to disarm, it would solve and end Turkey’s number one national security concern.

But how Mr Ocalan’s request actually plays out is unclear. Mr Ocalan has been in prison for more than two decades. He has been removed from the group’s decision makers and commanders in Iraq's Qandil mountains. What happens next to the group's former members across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and sympathetic groups in Iran also remains to be seen.

Iraq has in recent months cracked down on the PKK and is increasing military co-operation with Turkey, but the militant group's affiliates there are atomised and widespread. Corralling them away from their mountain bases and convincing followers that an armed struggle might not suit them will not be an easy task for whomever it falls to.

One potential outcome, analysts say, is not a complete dissolution of the group, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, Washington and the EU, but a fissuring.

Oytun Orhan, a programme coordinator at the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Studies, believes some former members will look for more peaceful ways to advocate for Kurdish rights across the region, while a smaller, marginalised PKK will continue to believe that an armed struggle serves their interests.

“Within Kurdish politics, there will be a division between those who want to distance themselves from the PKK and those who advocate acting with the support of the PKK,” Mr Orhan told The National.

“In this respect, Ocalan's statement will have consequences, but I think it is very unlikely that the PKK terrorism will end completely and the organisation will dissolve itself completely.”

Turkish government officials have framed the development as a step towards a “terror-free Turkey,” and Ankara potentially has a lot to gain. The PKK dissolving itself would reduce security risks and facilitate regional investment aims, such as the much-discussed “Development Road” trade route stretching from Iraq to Turkey. Its path would travel through areas currently seen as easy targets for PKK attacks and securing those would be a win for investors on both sides of the border.

But Turkish officials say they are waiting to see what results from Ocalan’s call: whether all the PKK’s affiliates will in fact disarm, or whether this tentative peace process will collapse like previous attempts. Ankara carries out cross-border military campaigns against PKK members in Iraq and Syria, and any suspicion that the group will continue to pose a threat will prompt these to continue.

"Whether this call will be followed or not is now a practical issue, and those who do not will suffer the consequences if they do," said Mehmet Ucum, a senior advisor to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a statement posted on X.

Polls by Turkish research organisation Optimar in December 2024 suggested that Turks would support the disarming of the PKK if it meant fewer terror attacks in the country. But respondents also said they were not convinced that all the group’s fighters would heed the call.

“In general, the Turkish public would be happy to see the PKK disarm but anything that is seen as a concession to the PKK is risky,” a senior official from Turkey’s main political opposition, the Republican People’s Party, told The National before Ocalan’s statement was released. “This is why they [the Turkish government] is being cautious. It is all going to take a while.”

The conditions under which Ocalan agreed to the move are also not entirely clear. How a wider peace process with the PKK might play out will still probably be the subject of long negotiations between Turkish and Kurdish officials, and regional partners.

Ocalan has not been released from prison. The Turkish government has not reversed the replacement with state appointees of elected Kurdish officials arrested on terrorism charges in the country’s south-east. Kurdish demands for changes to the Turkish constitution to enhance their rights have not materialised. While the Turkish government wants to eliminate the militant group, Kurds in Turkey are expecting democratic freedoms to be guaranteed in a post-PKK world.

Ocalan’s call has huge ramifications for Syria, too. It included a veiled address to the Kurdish-led self-administration in the country’s north-east. It has not dissolved itself following the fall of Bashar Al Assad's former regime in December. Reading between the lines, his address encouraged them to end aspirations for autonomy within Syria – a tacit nudge to Kurdish officials to accept the rule of the new government in Damascus.

“The inevitable outcome of the extreme nationalist deviations – such as a separate nation-state, federation, administrative autonomy, or culturalist solutions – fails to answer the historical sociology of the society,” Ocalan said in his letter.

That autonomy has so far proved to be one of the most challenging issues in the attempt to establish unity across Syrian territory and amid its armed forces post-Assad. But following Ocalan’s order, it remains unclear if Kurdish militias in Syria will see military integration with the rest of Syria as their best option.

Again, Ocalan’s call could cause a split in PKK offshoots there, starting with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which forms the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military power affiliated with the Kurdish-led self-administration who carried out operations against ISIS. The SDF’s receipt of US support has created a wedge between Washington and Ankara, which accuses the US of supporting one terrorist group against another.

Mr Orhan of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies said that a PKK split in Syria might create some common ground and foster a closer relationship between the US and Turkey.

“Turkey and the US could support those in Syria who are closer to the US and the West and who prefer to stay away from the PKK,” he said.

While SDF commander Mazloum Abdi welcomed Ocalan's “historic” call, he said it applied only to the PKK and was “not related to us in Syria”.

Mr Abdi was a longtime PKK cadre, and his comments appear to be an attempt to justify the US-backed, Kurdish-majority SDF maintaining its weapons and existence as a bloc, even as it faces pressure from Damascus and Turkey to dissolve into a centralised military. Despite his deep ties to the PKK, the framing of fighters under his leadership as a separate entity is indicative of the challenges ahead.

Despised as an enemy of the state by Turkey, Ocalan is an iconic but distant figurehead for many Kurds. Whether those now leading the group across the region will heed his words is the crux of the matter in the weeks and months ahead.