On May 12, 2025, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) formally ended its four-decade-long insurgency against Turkey and disbanded. While the PKK more than decade before had ended its separatist agenda in favor of greater federalism, and while Kurdish fighters had laid down their arms or fled to Syria as part of an agreement during a peace process a decade earlier, imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan ordered the group to dissolve. They did.
For Kurds, Öcalan is a Nelson Mandela-like figure; for nationalist Turks and those on Ankara’s gravy train, he is a master-terrorist. What both supporters and critics can agree upon is that he is dedicated to the Kurdish cause. Why, then, did he agree to dissolve the PKK?
Erdoğan offers peace talks whenever he wants Kurdish support, and then turns on the Kurds when he wants to cultivate his nationalist base.
The public reason is that he did so as part of an ongoing peace process with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yet while there have been talks and ongoing meetings, the promise of a peace process is not enough to explain Öcalan’s call and the PKK’s acquiescence to it. After all, Erdoğan offers peace talks whenever he wants Kurdish support, and then turns on the Kurds when he wants to cultivate his nationalist base. What does not change is that the Kurds’ best-known, most legitimate politicians—Öcalan and Selahattin Demirtaş—remain in prison, in Demirtaş’s case long after his sentence ended.
Öcalan and the PKK changed their positions for two reasons. First was a desire to protect Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous region in northeastern Syria. While some think tank scholars and analysts in Washington describe the Kurdish region as a Marxist-run safe haven for terror, this is dishonest: Most who promote this narrative have never been to the region nor seen its operations with their own eyes. It is also poor analysis to believe a political movement that began officially in 1984 but had its roots in the Cold War milieu of the 1970s has not evolved. East Germany and Poland changed dramatically since the mid-1980s; so, too, did the PKK. For American scholars to label Rojava a terror entity is to implicate Erdoğan, ironically, given that the Syrian Kurds sold oil at a steep discount to the sons of Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, who in turn would sell it on to Turkey as a lesser discount, keeping the difference.
Regardless, the Autonomous Administration is a huge success for the Kurds, and the first time Kurds put Öcalan’s philosophy into practice in a significant way. Kurds fought hard to free the region from the Islamic State’s grip, at a time when Erdoğan was impeding the anti-Islamic State fight, seeking to profit from the group, if not actively supporting it.
By dissolving the PKK, Öcalan sought to protect the Syrian Kurdish entity. It was thriving despite its isolation and was the model for everything the United States demanded Syria be—tolerant, multicultural, and moderate. Ending the PKK, Öcalan believed, could end the calumny that Turkey promoted that it was a terror entity. At the same time, Kurds believed they could gain more through politics than insurgency, especially if the process would mean an end to arbitrary arrests of Kurdish politicians and the release from prison of Demirtaş and possibly Öcalan. After all, for the Kurds, peace means reconciliation.
By supporting a full-scale attack, replete with throwing female Kurdish prisoners to their death from high buildings Islamic State-style, Erdoğan is showing Öcalan and former PKK supporters that they miscalculated and that Erdoğan is insincere.
By delegitimizing the logic of peace, they are pushing Kurds to return to fighting, not only in Syria but also perhaps in Turkey.
This creates a danger dynamic. First, PKK fighters put down their weapons and moved to Syria as part of a peace process with Turkey. They subsequently fought the Islamic State—with U.S. support, equipment, and encouragement—but they did not pose a threat to Turkey. Nonetheless, Erdoğan resumed attacks, with aircraft the United States had previously sold Turkey, drones, and with Turkey’s Syrian proxies. Now, Turkey shows its negotiations with Öcalan were never sincere.
Kurds have nowhere to go. Erdoğan and his advisors like Hakan Fidan or partners like U.S. Ambassador Tom Barrack may cheerlead, but they should be wary. Kurds will not march to slaughter. By delegitimizing the logic of peace, they are pushing Kurds to return to fighting, not only in Syria but also perhaps in Turkey, if politics do not offer another path forward. Creating the dynamics of an Islamic State prison release just throws fuel on the fire.
President Donald Trump still wants his own Nobel Peace Prize, but by failing to restrain Turkey and even appearing to give a green light to Ankara, he is setting the scene for violence inside Turkey at a level not seen in almost a half-century.
