Tuesday, 11 February 2025 19:02

The End of the PKK?

By Halil Karaveli

Ocalan has some incentive to take Bahceli’s—and by extension the Turkish government’s—proposal seriously. Although the PKK is still able to execute the occasional terrorist attack against Turkish targets, it has lost its military campaign in Turkey. The group survives in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq, where its headquarters are located. But there, too, Turkey’s drones and a ring of forward bases have hemmed in the PKK, preventing the group from using northern Iraq’s mountainous terrain to stage attacks into Turkey. Ankara’s close partnership with the Kurdistan Regional Government, which leads the semiautonomous Iraqi region, further reduces the PKK’s room for maneuver. With the group’s military prospects looking grim, Ocalan, who is entering his late 70s, has reason to get behind a political solution. Back in 2013, he was quoted as saying, “I want to see peace before I die.”

The political opening in Turkey raised hopes for a settlement with the PKK, but it is the recent fall of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad that could truly presage the group’s end. Offshoots of the PKK remain active in and in control of northeastern Syria, where their militants have fought alongside the United States in the battle against the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. But with the collapse of the Assad regime comes an opportunity for Kurdish-majority regions in northern Syria and their militias to be integrated with the rest of the country. Losing this safe haven could be the last straw for an already weakened PKK.

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Photo by Asmaa Waguih for "Foreign Policy Magazine: PKK Female Fighters Photo Gallery"

The end of the organization, however, is far from certain. The Turkish government has tried peace negotiations with the PKK before, in 2009 and 2013, to no avail. And despite Ocalan’s status in the group, it is not a given that the Iraqi-based acting leadership would heed his call to disarm and disband. Indeed, the day after Bahceli advanced his proposal for Ocalan’s release, the PKK carried out a terrorist attack at a military-industrial complex outside Ankara, killing five civilians. Moreover, if an agreement with the PKK is not part of a larger arrangement securing the equal status and democratic rights of Turkey’s Kurdish population, simmering discontent could once again spill over into armed insurgency. And if a militarized, semiautonomous, U.S.-backed Kurdish region across the border in Syria continues to harbor fighters and fuel secessionist aspirations, the threat of a PKK resurgence would remain.

These obstacles cannot be discounted. But the confluence of the domestic political developments in Turkey and disruption across the region has raised the possibility that they can be overcome. More than at any time in recent history, there is a real prospect that the PKK could disband—finally removing a threat that has plagued Turkey for the past 40 years.

SAFE HAVEN

Syrian support has long been vital to the PKK’s survival. From the early 1980s, the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad allowed Ocalan and his followers a base of operations on Syrian-controlled territory. Assad was an ally of the Soviet Union, and the PKK adhered to Marxism-Leninism until the end of the Cold War. His backing of the PKK endured into the 1990s, in part driven by Syria’s historic resentment of Turkey since the Turkish annexation in 1939 of Alexandretta, a province that at that time belonged to the French mandate of Syria. Only in 1998 did Assad expel Ocalan, yielding to the threat of military intervention by Turkish President Suleyman Demirel. Ocalan was captured in Nairobi, Kenya, in February 1999 and promptly extradited to Turkey. The PKK relocated its headquarters to Qandil in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, exploiting the power vacuum created when Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

Syria assumed renewed importance for the PKK after the start of the country’s civil war. In 2012, Bashar al-Assad withdrew government forces from northeastern Syria, allowing a Syrian offshoot of the PKK, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), to establish a proto-state—the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava or western Kurdistan—in the region, which has a large Kurdish population. Assad, in effect, handed control of a third of his country, including most of its oil fields, to Kurdish authorities. In return, the Kurdish militias ceased their armed resistance to the regime, thus weakening the larger opposition movement. And Assad was able to deal a blow to Turkey, which was supporting the uprising against his rule.

Turkey has tried peace negotiations with the PKK before, to no avail.

Turkey, fearing that the empowerment of the PKK’s Syrian offshoot would embolden the broader organization, initiated peace negotiations with Ocalan in 2013. But after the PKK attempted to seize control of urban centers in the Kurdish-majority provinces of southeastern Turkey in 2015, talks broke down, and the Turkish army launched a campaign to dislodge militants from the cities. The PKK was defeated in Turkey, but it lives on through close links with the Syrian-based PYD and its military units. The PYD is incorporated into the Kurdistan Communities Union, an umbrella organization founded in 2005 that embraces the political goals of the PKK and is led by Ocalan. PKK members have joined the YPG, which makes up the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the coalition that serves as the military force of northeastern Syria’s self-governing region and is a close U.S. partner in the fight against ISIS. The commander in chief of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi, is a former PKK member who worked with Ocalan when the latter resided in Syria.

Turkey has carried out three limited military operations against the PKK’s affiliates in Syria: in the al-Bab region in 2016, in the Afrin region in 2018, and in a corridor running between the cities of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn in 2019. The Turkish military maintains a partial buffer zone in northern Syria, but the U.S. military presence in the region has so far deterred a full-scale Turkish intervention to eliminate PKK-affiliated militias. The official U.S. mission is to provide training, combat support, and military cover to the SDF, but in practice this means that U.S. forces work with the YPG. For Ankara, the difference between the YPG and the PKK is merely one of branding. Washington’s collaboration with the Kurdish militias in Syria has thus complicated U.S.-Turkish relations.

THE PRESSURE BUILDS

With Assad gone, however, the proto-state in northeastern Syria may no longer be viable—and the United States will have to consider options other than relying on PKK affiliates to prevent the return of ISIS. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group that overthrew the Syrian regime in December, has rejected a proposal from Kurdish authorities for a federal system that would allow them to retain their autonomy. The group now leading Syria has a history of clashing with the Kurds: in 2012, after Kurdish authorities first took control in northeastern Syria, HTS’s predecessor, the Turkish-backed jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, entered Syria from Turkey to attack the Kurdish militias. More recently, Ahmed al-Shara, HTS’s leader and Syria’s transitional president, has stated that the SDF should be integrated into the national army so that military power will be “in the hands of the state alone.” And Syria’s new defense minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra, told reporters in January that HTS has a backup plan should the SDF refuse to negotiate, stating, “If we have to use force, we will be ready.”

In the weeks since Assad’s fall, senior Turkish officials have repeatedly emphasized their wish to see the YPG disbanded. In December, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the elimination of the group as Ankara’s “strategic objective,” calling on Syria’s new leaders to dismantle the YPG; expel its commanders, including Syrian ones; and restore central control of all Syrian territory. A few days later, Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler echoed that sentiment, stating that Turkey’s “priority is the liquidation of the YPG.”

Syrian support has long been vital to the PKK’s survival.

If HTS and Turkey achieve their objectives, whether through negotiations or by force, the PKK will suffer a fatal blow. From Turkey’s perspective, the main threat is not a military one: the flat terrain along the Syrian-Turkish border is easy to monitor, and unlike the mountainous topography in northern Iraq, it is not suitable for guerrilla warfare. But Ankara does fear that an autonomous, armed, Kurdish-led political entity in Syria could become—if it isn’t already—the focus of Kurdish separatist aspirations in Turkey. That risk has proved manageable in the case of northern Iraq: Ankara and the Kurdistan Regional Government have good relations, and the PKK has been marginalized there. But Syria is a different matter. The Syrian Kurds have closer bonds with the Kurds in Turkey than the Iraqi Kurds do; many are descendants of the refugees who fled to Syria after the suppression of the first Kurdish uprising in Turkey in 1925. Rojava, therefore, is a pole of attraction that northern Iraq never was. The PKK envisions a decentralized system of self-governance that would span the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. As long as autonomous rule in Syria endures, this dream stays alive.

Now, the biggest obstacle to ending that autonomy and integrating the SDF into a Syrian national force is the United States. Last month, Abdi, the SDF commander, told Le Monde that the group wants the northeastern Syrian region to maintain “administrative autonomy . . . while cooperating with the central government.”He has also affirmed the group’s desire for U.S. forces to remain in Syria to supervise a cease-fire between the SDF and the Syrian National Army, a Turkish-supported militia. But HTS and the Turkish government have rebuffed these aspirations. Only with continued support from the United States can the SDF withstand the pressure from both Syria’s new leaders and their backers in Ankara. Washington, for its part, may be inclined to stand by its Kurdish allies, even at the risk of further estrangement from Ankara. During his Senate confirmation hearing, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of the importance of cooperation with the SDF to keep ISIS in check and warned of the consequences of “abandoning partners” who have made “a great sacrifice.” President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been vague about the continued presence of the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, saying last week that “they don’t need us involved.”

A PATH TO PEACE?

There is still a path, albeit a narrow one, to a political solution that could bring long-term stability. Disbanding and disarming the SDF and ending the autonomous status of northeastern Syria could help stabilize the country as the new Syrian government consolidates control. Turkey, with the principal threat across its border eliminated, could be convinced to drop its more far-reaching demands on the Syrian Kurds, including the expulsion of all YPG commanders from Syria, and encouraged to reach a mutually acceptable agreement with its Kurdish interlocutors in Turkey, including amnesty for PKK militants, the release of imprisoned Kurdish politicians, and the enshrining of equality between Turks and Kurds. (The last aim would require amendments to Turkey’s constitution, which stipulates that only Turkish can be taught as a mother tongue and that every citizen of the Republic of Turkey is a Turk.) The United States can take Turkey up on its offer to assume leadership of the mission to suppress ISIS, and in the process of negotiations over a U.S. withdrawal from Syria, Washington can push both Ankara and Damascus to guarantee rights for the Kurds.

Ankara is not going to concede Kurdish self-rule within Turkey, as some Kurdish activists demand. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire looms large in the minds of Turkish leaders, and the lesson they took is that self-rule inevitably leads to secession. And there is reason to be skeptical that an authoritarian Turkish state would make significant democratic concessions: in November, with outreach to Ocalan already underway, three Kurdish mayors were removed from their offices and charged with abetting “terrorism.”

There is a path, albeit a narrow one, to a political solution.

Yet Turkey’s leaders do seem to recognize the urgency of a settlement. For a state that refused for decades to even acknowledge the existence of the Kurds, the recognition that Kurdish citizens are, in the words of Erdogan’s adviser Mehmet Ucum, “co-owners” of a common republic marks a significant step. And the government is cracking down on the anti-Kurdish far right: in January, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the far-right Victory Party and a fierce critic of the opening to the Kurds, was arrested and charged with “inciting the public to hatred and enmity.” Bahceli’s proposed bargain with Ocalan may not herald a conversion to liberalism, but it does reveal the Turkish political elite’s pragmatism in the face of perceived threats.

Well before the Assad regime collapsed, Ankara was growing worried that regional turmoil could stoke domestic instability. Three weeks ahead of his appeal to Ocalan in October, Bahceli explained, “When we call for peace in the world, we must also secure peace in our own country.” In an address to parliament the same month, Erdogan emphasized the need to “fortify the home front” in the face of “Israeli aggression.” Ankara’s concerns about foreign meddling did not come from nowhere. In November, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described the Kurdish people as Israel’s “natural ally” and said that Israel should strengthen its ties with them. And in October, the pro-PKK newspaper Yeni Ozgur Politika republished a section of Ocalan’s Manifesto for Democratic Civilization, written more than a decade ago, in which he suggested that the PKK could align with the United States and Israel against Turkey. Now that Ocalan has changed his tune—in December, the PKK leader spoke of a “historic responsibility to renew and fortify Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood”—Turkish leaders will not want to miss the opportunity to mend an internal divide that an external power could exploit.

Removing the threat of the PKK will depend on many factors. Ocalan must convince his organization that armed militancy is a dead end after the regime change in Syria. The broader Kurdish population will need to see an opportunity for a better future in Turkey. The United States will need to withdraw from Syria, enabling the Syrian Kurdish militias and government to integrate into a new national body. None of these outcomes are guaranteed, but with foresight from Ocalan, the Turkish government, the new Syrian leadership, and the new U.S. administration, all of them are now within reach.

Read the article here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/turkey/end-pkk

HALIL KARAVELI is a Senior Fellow at the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and the author of Why Turkey Is Authoritarian: From Ataturk to Erdogan.

 

Published in Staff Publications

by Svante E. Cornell
AFPC Press/Armin Lear, 2025

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Link to Table of Contents and Introduction

Link to Chapter 7, "Iran's Arc of Domination"

Link to Chapter 12, "The Failure of Islamism in Turkey Reshuffles the Region"

For decades, the Greater Middle East has been a leading challenge to American foreign policy. This vast region - ranging from North Africa in the west to Afghanistan in the east, and from the borders of Central Asia down to the Horn of Africa in the south - has been a cauldron of turmoil that has affected not just American interests, but generated threats to the American homeland.

The multitude of challenges in this region has led to some confusion. What should be the focus of U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East?

This book explores this state of affairs and its implications by delving deeper into how the current geopolitics of the Greater Middle East came to be. A first few chapters look back to the history of the region and the historic rivalries among Turks, Arabs and Persians up to the end of the Cold War. The book then examines the main current power centers of the region - Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. It then turns to the geopolitical competition among them in recent years, starting with Iran's efforts to build an "Arc of Domination" across the region.

The book covers the advance of Islamists following the Arab Upheavals, the civil war among the Sunnis from 2013 to 2018, America's pendulum swings with regard to Iran policy, and the reshuffle of the region following Turkey's turn in a more nationalist direction. Finally, the book ends with an attempt to draw out implications for America's approach to the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East.

SVANTE E. CORNELL is Research Director of the American Foreign Policy Council's Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington D.C., and a co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm, Sweden. Cornell was educated at the Middle East Technical University and Uppsala University. He formerly served as Associate Professor at Uppsala University and at Johns Hopkins-University-SAIS, and is also a Policy Advisor with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences.

By Svante E. Cornell, ed.

Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program
Silk Road Paper
July 2024

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Introduction

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When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, a sense over euphoria swept over a Türkiye that had just seen its application to join the European Community rejected. The emergence of five Turkic-majority states in the Caucasus and Central Asia provided an alternative possibility to European integration: Türkiye could look east and seek to build a new confederation of Turkic states.

The idea was vigorously embraced but soon appeared stillborn for a number of reasons. For one, the Turkic nations of the former USSR had just gotten rid of one overlord and were not in the market for another. The sometimes haughty tone of Turkish officials toward them did not help either. Besides, Türkiye was beset by internal problems – a rising PKK insurgency in the southeast, a troubled economy with runaway inflation, and a surge of Islamist politics that frightened the secular leaders of Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

For two decades thereafter, Central Asia and the Caucasus did not figure prominently in Turkish foreign policy. Economic realities forced Türkiye to look again toward the EU in the 2000s. After consolidating power, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP government turned south – jumping headfirst into the frayed politics of the Middle East, a region that would keep Türkiye preoccupied for over a decade. But a combination of internal and external shocks in the 2010s led to a domestic realignment in a nationalist direction, which also led to a renewed interest in the Turkic states of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

As this volume will detail, Türkiye has been actively pursuing its influence in the region bilaterally but also multilaterally, through the upgrading of Turkic cooperation with the creation of the Organization of Turkic States.

It is worth pausing for a minute on the ethnolinguistic aspect of Türkiye’s approach to the region. While Türkiye continues to maintain bilateral relations with non-Turkic states like Georgia and Tajikistan, there is a clear emphasis on ethnic and linguistic ties in Türkiye’s approach. In this sense, Türkiye differs markedly from Russian and Chinese approaches in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Because neither Russia nor China can appeal to common identity markers, these powers have focused mainly on economic and security issues as they have devised their regional mechanisms, such as the Eurasian Economic Union or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Whatever the faults of these instruments – and there are many – they are at least inclusive, in that they do not differentiate between regional states on the basis of identity. Türkiye’s approach, by contrast, stresses common identity markers and makes them central to its bid for influence in the region. Indeed, increasingly the language used both during OTS meetings and in bilateral meetings of Turkish and regional leaders stressed “brotherhood” of fellow Turkic peoples. This is in one sense an asset that other regional powers cannot compete with. On the other hand, emphasizing the ethnolinguistic commonality between Türkiye and Turkic peoples risks alienating the non-Turkic peoples of the region and feeding the existing sentiments in Georgia and Tajikistan – not even to speak of Armenia – countries whose own nationalist narratives have been motivated in part by enmity against Turks, past or present.

That being said, Türkiye’s renewed involvement with Central Asia and the Caucasus is one of the most significant developments in the region in the past several years. It complements the rise in regional cooperation in Central Asia, as well as between Central Asia and Azerbaijan. And importantly, at a time when relations between the West and Russia are at an all-time low and Western relations with China are deteriorating, Türkiye’s growing influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus provides much-needed opportunities for regional leaders to expand their international relations. In the foreign policy strategy adopted by regional leaders, balance is key. Their continued sovereignty and independence depends on establishing relations with other powers that help counterbalance their relations with Russia and China. Since the U.S. and EU have thus far been unwilling to provide enough of a regional presence to generate such a balancing force, Türkiye’s involvement is a welcome opportunity for regional states to build ties with outside powers that are not shy to get involved in security and military affairs.

 

By Dr. Mamuka Tsereteli

July 12, 2023

American Foreign Policy Council Insights

Last year, more than a million people left Russia, marking what is likely the largest yearly emigration in recorded history. By way of comparison, emigration from Russia between 1917 and 1922, following the Bolshevik Revolution and the country’s ensuing civil war, totaled 1.5 million over half-a-decade. Fear of conscription into the Kremlin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine was a principal driver for last year’s exodus. The result has been a major outflow of younger and well-educated people in high-value industries– with significant long-term implications for both Russia’s economy and its society.

THE SHAPE OF THE EXODUS

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been two major waves of emigration. The first took place mostly during March 2022, and included wider segments of Russian society: from those who disapproved of the war to those who had pragmatic reasons, like jobs related to Western companies which they did not want to lose, to a larger group that was afraid they would be called upon to serve in Ukraine. The second, which started after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s September 2022 announcement of a “partial mobilization” to beef up Russia’s military ranks, was more targeted in nature and made up predominantly of those seeking to avoid the draft. 

According to a recent study of the first wave of migrants, the average age was 32 – notably younger than the average age of the general Russian population (46). Among migrants, 86 percent held higher education degrees, as compared to a 27 percent average within the Russian population. Moreover, 27 percent of them could afford to buy car, compared to only 4 percent of ordinary Russians, suggesting that those migrants had better than average incomes while in Russia. Specifically, according to the Russian government, about 10 percent of the overall IT workforce (approximately 100,000) left the country in 2022, and have not returned.

Where have these immigrants headed? Russia's non-EU neighbor states have been the primary destinations. While the numbers are, by their nature, imprecise, the majority of those who have emigrated to date appear to have settled in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia. Smaller numbers, meanwhile, have migrated to the EU, Israel, Kyrgyzstan and the U.S., as well as places like Serbia, Mongolia, and Argentina.

Notably, this trend has created a strong countercurrent. Finland, the Baltic states and Poland all enacted visa bans on Russian citizens in September 2022, while the EU as a whole has instituted restrictions on entry to Russians. 

RISKS AND REWARDS

The out-migration outlined above will have a lasting impact on the Russian economy for years to come. Even before the start of Putin’s war, the national economy was facing an acute labor shortage as a result of long-term demographic trends, as well as a “brain drain” of skilled workers which has plagued the country since the 1990s. Now, the war-driven migration of educated Russians is making matters much, much worse. 

This wave of migration will also have important and lasting impacts on the host countries where these Russians settle. On a positive note, they bring with them money and skills, thus contributing to local economies. But, since they tend to be wealthier than the majority of local populations, these migrants will invariably increase demand on local markets, thereby affecting prices. They have also caused serious pressure on real estate markets in host countries. Local labor trends are being affected, too; since not all of these migrants have jobs with Western companies, and they do not rank as the wealthiest Russians (those with unlimited financial resources), they gradually will need to find jobs in their host countries, increasing pressure on already uneasy labor markets in the process.

At the same time, these migrants bring with them both immediate and longer-term risks. First off, most of those who left Russia following the invasion of Ukraine did not do so because of their political convictions, or disagreements with the policies of President Putin. Rather, the great majority were escaping mobilization, and are merely draft dodgers. In other words, these Russians still rank as patriots, and so raise a real political concern. If allowed to integrate in the new host nations, these migrants will gradually gain electoral power, eventually impacting both domestic and international priorities, particularly in countries with small populations and narrow, contested elections, such as Armenia and Georgia.  

Secondly, some of these migrants can be expected to already have connections with Russian security agencies, or to become targets of Russian recruitment in the future. After all, most will interact with their fellow Russian migrants, and some are already building lives, businesses and communities in host countries. Russia’s security services will have great interest in penetrating those communities, both to monitor the state of the opposition to the current regime in Moscow, and in order to manipulate local opinion. These communities could also easily become cells for espionage operations or instruments for Russian soft power projection down the road.

These are real and tangible threats which require sustained attention from the national security apparats of countries that are hosting Russian migrants now or will do so in the future. Moreover, the size of this potential problem could grow precipitously, depending on what course the Ukraine war takes – and the methods the Putin regime resorts to – in the weeks and months ahead. 

Mamuka Tsereteli is Senior Fellow for Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council, and a Senior Fellow at AFPC’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.

Published in Staff Publications

Listen to CACI director Svante Cornell's recent interview on the 'John Batchelor Show' podcast regarding Turkey's 2023 presidential election. Click here!

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