People & Histories
1984–2025

The PKK insurgency in Turkey

The Kurdistan Workers' Party launches an armed insurgency against the Turkish state, beginning a four-decade conflict that kills more than 40,000 people.

Debated by historians waruprisingrepressionidentityminoritiespeace

Part of the story of Kurds and Turkey (Türkiye).

Origins

The early republic treated Kurds as Turks to be assimilated; after the revolts of 1925 and 1937–38 public expressions of Kurdish identity were suppressed, and officials spoke of “mountain Turks”.

  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
  • Turkey: A Modern History (4th edition) — Erik J. Zürcher, I.B. Tauris (2017)

In the 1970s Turkish universities were full of left-wing and nationalist politics. Among the students was Abdullah Öcalan, from a poor village near Urfa. In 1978 he and a small group founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist–Leninist organisation that aimed at an independent, socialist Kurdistan and attacked “feudal” Kurdish landlords and rival Kurdish groups as fiercely as the state.

  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
  • The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains — Paul White, Zed Books (2015)

The 1980 military coup made the conflict far more likely. Thousands of Kurdish activists were jailed, and Diyarbakır military prison became notorious for torture; many PKK veterans trace their path to it.

  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)
A 1983 law banned publications and broadcasts in Kurdish. It was lifted only in 1991.
  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)

The war

On 15 August 1984 PKK fighters attacked the towns of Eruh and Şemdinli. The insurgency grew into a full-scale guerrilla war in the south-east. In the 1990s, its worst years, the army emptied and burned thousands of villages to deny the guerrillas support, and hundreds of thousands, by many estimates more than a million, people were displaced, many to the slums of Diyarbakır, Istanbul and other western cities.

  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
Thousands of unsolved killings of Kurdish activists and journalists were widely attributed to state-linked death squads. The PKK, for its part, killed soldiers and police, teachers and civilians, and members of state-armed Kurdish “village guard” militias and their families, and bombed cities.
  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
  • The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains — Paul White, Zed Books (2015)
  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)

In February 1999 Öcalan was captured in Kenya and brought back to Turkey. Sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment after Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002, he has been held on the prison island of İmralı ever since.

  • Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
From prison he steered the PKK away from demanding a separate state towards autonomy and his theory of “democratic confederalism”, a decentralised, gender-egalitarian self-government.
  • The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains — Paul White, Zed Books (2015)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Ceasefires and reforms

The 2000s brought real change, partly driven by Turkey’s bid to join the EU: Kurdish-language broadcasting and private courses were permitted, and in 2009 the state broadcaster opened a Kurdish channel.

  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
A peace process from 2013 raised hopes, but it collapsed in July 2015. The fighting that followed included months-long curfews and urban warfare in Kurdish towns such as Cizre and the old city of Diyarbakır (Sur).
  • The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains — Paul White, Zed Books (2015)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

The overall death toll is usually given as more than 40,000, including soldiers, guerrillas and civilians.

Alongside the war, a legal pro-Kurdish political movement kept forming parties that were repeatedly banned and refounded under new names: HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP, HDP and today’s DEM Party. Its mayors have often been removed and replaced by state trustees, and former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, jailed in November 2016, was held for years despite European Court of Human Rights rulings that his detention was unlawful.
  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

How it ended

In late 2024 Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Turkish nationalist MHP, surprised the country by suggesting that Öcalan could call off the insurgency. In February 2025 Öcalan did so; in May the PKK announced its dissolution, and in July fighters burned their weapons in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many Turks and Kurds are cautiously hopeful; many remember earlier hopes that failed. Whether this proves to be the end of a forty-year war depends on what follows.

How it's seen
Kurdish views (themselves divided)

Many Kurds in Turkey, though far from all, see the PKK as the movement that forced the state to admit Kurds exist: an armed response to decades in which Kurdish identity and language were banned, peaceful demands were met with prison, and the 1980 junta tortured Kurdish prisoners. The state's war, with emptied villages, extrajudicial killings and jailed elected politicians, punished a whole people. Others, including conservative and religious Kurds and the Iraqi KDP, reject its violence, its Marxist roots and its intolerance of Kurdish rivals.

  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
  • The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains — Paul White, Zed Books (2015)
  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)
  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)

Turkish state and many Turks

A separatist terrorist organisation responsible for killing soldiers, police, teachers and civilians, including Kurds, and the main threat to the country's unity. Kurds are equal citizens of Turkey; the problem was terrorism, not identity, and the state's operations were counter-terrorism, not a war on Kurds. Many families of fallen soldiers want no concessions.

  • PKK — Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  • Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Turkey: A Modern History (4th edition) — Erik J. Zürcher, I.B. Tauris (2017)

International designations

Turkey, the United States (since 1997), the European Union and the United Kingdom list the PKK as a terrorist organisation. Human rights groups have also documented grave abuses by Turkish security forces in the conflict, including village burnings and extrajudicial killings.

  • Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence — Aliza Marcus, New York University Press (2007)
  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)

Many observers

Both sides committed grave abuses. Many Kurds reject the PKK's violence while sharing its grievances, and many vote for mainstream parties, including Erdoğan's AKP. A durable peace depends on political rights as well as disarmament.

  • The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance — Cengiz Gunes, Routledge (2012)
  • A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
  • Turkey: A Modern History (4th edition) — Erik J. Zürcher, I.B. Tauris (2017)

Why it matters today

Kurds

Almost every Kurdish family in Turkey was touched by the conflict, through deaths, prison, burned villages or forced migration to the cities. Attitudes to the PKK divide Kurds as well as separating Kurds from Turks, and the peace process now under way will decide whether that era is truly over.

Turkey (Türkiye)

The conflict touched every Turkish family, through sons conscripted and killed as "martyrs", PKK bombings in cities, and for Kurdish citizens, burned villages and forced displacement. It is the deepest internal divide in the country. The peace process that began in 2024–25 is the biggest chance in decades to end it, but feelings on all sides are raw.