Kurdish PKK Marxist Terrorist Group Announces Plan to Disband After 40 Years

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey, confirmed Monday it will disband after 40 years of conflict and over 40,000 deaths.

The formal end of the PKK insurgency came a little over two months after the jailed co-founder and spiritual leader of the party, Abdullah Ocalan, called for a “laying down of arms.”

Ocalan began talking about disbanding his organization early this year. He wrote an open letter on April 27 in which he asked the PKK to “dissolve itself.”

The PKK soon declared a unilateral ceasefire and embraced its founder’s vision for “peace and democratic society,” assuming Turkey reciprocated. The group asked Turkey to release Ocalan from prison to help guide its transition to peaceful coexistence, but that request had not been granted as of Monday morning.

The PKK was founded in 1978 as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization that made common cause with Palestinian militants. Ocalan, who is now 75, wrote the manifesto that launched the PKK and worked for years to recruit operatives and train them at camps in Syria. He has been in jail on a life sentence since 1999.

The relationship between the PKK and Syrian Kurds remains a sticking point to this day, as the Turkish government insists all armed Syrian Kurdish militias – including those which allied with the U.S. and Europe against the Islamic State – are linked to the PKK.

The PKK launched its first attacks on Turkish military posts in 1984, denouncing its targets as an occupying force intruding on a Kurdish homeland that would extend into Syria and Iraq if it became an independent state. The PKK did not confine itself to military targets for very long. It was classified as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States in 1997, and has also been sanctioned by the U.S. for trafficking in drugs to finance its activities.

The PKK statement on Monday said the group would disband and disarm in line with Ocalan’s request, and its activists would now pursue greater autonomy for Turkey’s Kurds through the democratic process, rather than using violence to create an independent homeland.

“We believe that Kurdish political parties, democratic organizations and opinion leaders will fulfil their responsibilities in developing Kurdish democracy and ensuring the formation of a Kurdish democratic nation,” the PKK said.

Both the PKK and Turkish government declared victory in the 40-year conflict, with the PKK claiming it disbanded because it has “completed its historical mission.” The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on the other hand, claimed victory of the PKK as a major step toward a “terror-free Turkey.”

“If the new PKK decision is fully implemented, shutting down all PKK branches, illegal structures, it will be a turning point,” a spokesman for Erdogan’s AKP party said on Monday.

A more cynical view would cast Monday’s events as something closer to mutual surrender. The PKK has been hit hard by Turkish airstrikes over the past couple of years and it lost a great deal of its strategic depth with the fall of dictator Bashar Assad in Syria. The insurgents who took over in Damascus are eager to curry favor with Turkey and one of Erdogan’s big demands is a crackdown on Kurdish militant groups.

For his part, Erdogan is on thin political ice heading into his next re-election campaign – and he might need greater support from pro-Kurdish parties to survive. Most polls suggest he would lose the next election to Istanbul’s popular Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who supporters say Erdogan tossed in prison on trumped-up charges to neutralize him as a political threat.

One of the reasons Ocalan began talking about disarmament in early 2025 is that one of Erdogan’s close allies, MP Devlet Bahceli of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), floated the idea of paroling Ocalan if he renounced violence. The MHP itself had a history of violence before making the more peaceable Bahceli its leader in 1997 and he has become something of a kingmaker by shrewdly wielding the increased influence of his mainstreamed party.

Ironically, Bahceli slammed Erdogan’s AKP for being too chummy with the PKK a decade ago, at a time when Erdogan was attempting to patch up his relationship with Turkey’s Kurds to counter the influence of Syrian Kurdish groups. Bahceli became much more supportive of Erdogan after the president survived a 2016 coup attempt, completing a strange journey to become Erdogan’s emissary to the Kurds after years of harshly criticizing both of them.

Although Erdogan made no immediate concessions to Turkish Kurds on Monday, the PKK said it expected him to offer more support for Kurdish self-governance and show greater respect for their culture.

“The state needs to take steps, it can no longer say ‘I cannot take steps on the Kurdish issue because of the [PKK] weapons.’ It should go ahead and take steps,” lawmaker Sinan Ciftyurek of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party told Kurdish news service Rudaw on Monday.

“An era comes to an end as the door of a new, more hopeful era is opening,” said DEM party spokeswoman Aysegul Dogan, hinting that her party would play a major role in drawing up the “roadmap” for peace in Turkey.

“We hope that this process will lead to positive results that serve the interests and well-being of the region and all. We also declare our full support for the success of this process by all possible means,” said Masoud Barzani, leader of the governing KDP party in Iraqi Kurdistan. The PKK party congress that resulted in the disbanding announcement was held in northern Iraq over the weekend.

Asaad al-Shaibani, foreign minister of the rebel government that now rules Syria, congratulated Turkey and said its peace agreement with the PKK would “enhance regional stability in Turkey and the region as a whole.”