Ahmet Mehmet 
The disarmament of the terrorist group Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê – PKK) is no minor development. It marks a significant strategic achievement for the Turkish government currently led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In February 2025, PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, speaking from his prison cell on İmralı Island, called on his followers to abandon the military dimension of their struggle for Kurdish ethnic rights.
Öcalan has been in Turkish custody since 1999, following his arrest in what is widely believed to have been a joint US–Turkish operation in Kenya, after he was expelled from Syria in the late 1990s.
To understand why Türkiye succeeded in this effort and how the Kurdish issue is likely to evolve in West Asia, it is important to revisit key historical factors that made disarmament possible.
As noted in a peer-reviewed study by the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies (CEJISS), “the PKK was established as a Marxist revolutionary organization and thus it enjoyed support from the Soviet Union and from Russia in the 1990s… its 3rd Congress was held in Moscow in 1996, suggesting that ties continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
This backing provided the PKK with ideological legitimacy, international networking opportunities, and crucial logistical support at a time when it was expanding militarily.
The PKK’s ties with the USSR and later with Russia are a significant long-term factor in explaining how the Turkish government succeeded in politically pressuring the PKK leadership to abandon the military component of their struggle.
Once that external support structure began to erode, the PKK found itself increasingly isolated in a shifting regional landscape where previous patron no longer shared the group’s strategic priorities.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia continued to view Türkiye as a geopolitical rival in Central Asia and the Caucasus for more than two decades, maintaining its approach to the Kurds based on the strategic configurations of the 1970s and 1980s. However, this dynamic gradually began to shift.
Changing energy routes, economic interdependence, and shared security concerns contributed to a new era of pragmatic engagement between Ankara and Moscow.
Türkiye and Russia ceased to view each other as geopolitical adversaries.
The clearest evidence of this shift emerged through their political cooperation in supporting the Aliyev regime’s efforts to bring an end to the Armenian nationalist project in Karabakh.
Moscow granted tacit approval for Ankara’s involvement in Karabakh—an unprecedented move, without which the Aliyev regime would not have dared to invite a NATO member state to participate in a military operation in a region as central to Russian geopolitical interests as the Caucasus.
Thus, the PKK has been deprived of the strategic external state backing it had enjoyed for many years. This, combined with the fact that many Kurds are now relatively well integrated into Turkish society, has stripped the PKK of any viable future to continue its armed struggle.
In 2024, the Polish Institute of International Affairs pointed out that “in the longer term, the Kurdish population’s increasing readiness to assimilate may contribute to potential normalisation.”
While external dynamics played an important role in Türkiye’s success in disarming the PKK, internal factors also deserve credit.
A key reason the disarmament did not trigger a split within the PKK—between factions favoring continued armed struggle and those advocating for a political path—was the patient and calculated approach adopted by the Turkish political and intelligence apparatus. The process was not imposed abruptly or through coercion alone but rather unfolded through a painstaking and somewhat organic political strategy.
This success was possible precisely because the Turkish state is not a primitive pseudo-state like that of the Saudis, who once publicly humiliated the Lebanese Prime Minister by forcing him to “resign” in a bizarre display of political theater—an act so transparently artificial that it failed to achieve its intended political outcome. In contrast, Türkiye’s approach to the PKK was grounded in long-term institutional planning and a credible political framework, rather than crude displays of power.
This leads us to the question as to how the disarmament will be unfold in political terms for the broader region.
Reporting on the procedural aspect of the disarmament, Russia Today reported that “senior PKK leaders – about 250 individuals – will not be allowed to remain near the Turkish, Iraqi, or Syrian borders. They’ll be relocated to third countries under strict dispersal rules to prevent the formation of new command centers. Turkish officials expect the process to be completed no later than September.”
The mechanism pointed out by Russia Today is an important element which is likely to have a follow up sequel.
The US leverages Kurdish separatism to exert pressure on key players in West Asia, including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye. The Kurdish issue represents more than a short-term tactical maneuver.
For Washington, it serves as a strategic contingency plan—what some analysts describe as “Plan B”—in the event of the collapse of the zionist project in Palestine. The creation of a Kurdish state could act as a substitute power center, reshaping the regional balance in favor of US interests.
The Kurdish issue also serves Israel, which has maintained close ties with Kurdish militants.
Both Israel and the US are likely to attempt to channel the militant cadre of the PKK against Islamic Iran in some shape or form.
The centrality of the Kurdish militias to zionist interests was highlighted quite clearly when a Kurdish terrorist group hiding in Iraq announced its support for the military aggression by the trio against Islamic Iran in June 2025.
Militarizing the former PKK cadre against Islamic Iran by Israel and the US cannot happen without Ankara’s agreement.
From a geopolitical angle, Türkiye is unlikely to agree to this, as Ankara has a lot to lose if the renewed militarization of the former PKK cadre turns into some type of a regional blowback.
However, considering that policy is derived based on track record and Erdogan’s track record is that of an unprincipled opportunist, it cannot be ruled out that for the right price, Erdogan can squander one of the biggest achievements of Turkish state for narrow personal political gains.
No matter how the PKK evolves post-disarmament, Türkiye’s experience should be replicated in Iraq, Syria and Iran taking local realities into account.
Armed Kurdish militias are a regional timebomb waiting to become proxies of the highest external bidders.
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