(Adnkronos) – Abdullah Ocalan’s call for the disarmament and dissolution of the PKK comes almost ten years after the July 2015 breakdown of the two-and-a-half-year ceasefire agreement with Turkey. Since then, according to the International Crisis Group, 7,152 people have been killed in both Turkey and northern Iraq. Marking what the think tank calls ”one of the bloodiest chapters in the PKK’s four-decade struggle against Turkey”.
Among the victims were 646 civilians and 1,494 members of Turkish state security forces, including soldiers, police officers and village guards, paramilitary groups made up of Kurds, armed and paid by the Turkish state. Then there are 262 victims defined as of ”unknown affiliation”, i.e. individuals between the ages of 16 and 35 who cannot be identified with certainty either as civilians or as combatants. Added to these are 4,786 PKK members killed, although the International Crisis Group believes the real number is higher. In mid-2023 Ankara had claimed, for example, that nearly 40,000 PKK militants had been “neutralised” (killed, captured or surrendered) since the resumption of hostilities in July 2015, including in northern Syria.
Since July 2015 the conflict between Turkey and the PKK has gone through several phases. Between 2015 and 2017, the violence particularly affected communities in some urban centres in south-eastern Turkey, which has a Kurdish majority, and sometimes even the country’s largest metropolitan centres. From 2017 onwards, the fighting shifted to rural areas of south-eastern Turkey, while in 2019 it shifted to northern Iraq and northern Syria.
