As Turkish forces continued to bombard the Kurdish militia allied with the United States in its counter-Islamic State campaign in northeastern Syria, Turkish accounts waged a parallel hashtag campaign on Twitter: #BabyKillerPKK.

The campaign was a reference to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a militant political organization in Turkey that the country and many of its allies, including the United States and European Union, have designated as a terror group. The Turkish government does not distinguish between the PKK in Turkey and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) operating in Syria, viewing the latter as an offshoot of the former. The United States, in contrast, has been allied with the YPG in its counter-ISIS campaign but has also previously acknowledged a link between the PKK and the YPG, while never officially designating, or even referring to, the latter as a terrorist organization.

Tweet from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announcing Turkey’s military operation against PKK and YPG forces. (Source: @RTErdogan/archive)

While other investigators in this space have now identified the same network, the DFRLab independently found evidence to suggest a portion of the hashtag traffic was driven by bot-like accounts. These accounts exhibited three of the key indicators of bot-like activity: a suspiciously high volume of activity, anonymous profiles, and amplification of other tweets promoting similar narratives.

In the methods it employed, the campaign resembled the June 2019 information operation that supported Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar’s offensive to take Tripoli. Like the pro-Haftar campaign before it, this anti-PKK operation demonstrated that some actors choose to employ online astroturfing operations as complements to ongoing military offensives.

An anti-PKK hashtag

#BabyKillerPKK began trending on Twitter in Turkey on October 10, 2019, registering roughly 118,000 mentions over a period of 12 hours.