SILVAN, TURKEY// In a framed photo on a table at a body-less funeral in the south-east Turkish town of Silvan, Ronat Sonecek crouches, smiling at the camera. Skinny and small-framed - almost frail - he looks much younger than his 16 years.

A second photo shows Ronat transformed: a tough-looking Kurdish militant in fatigues, serious eyes staring deadpan through a slit in the kaffiyeh wrapped around his face.

In August this year, Ronat was killed in a Turkish airstrike.

The young man's path tells the story of how Turkey's 40-year war with Kurdish militants has now become even more complex, with seemingly innumerable groups, multiple front lines and criss-crossed relationships among allies and enemies.

Like many men and women growing up in Turkey's Kurdish-majority south-east, Ronat had expressed unhappiness at living under a government he viewed as oppressive. He complained to his parents about being stopped arbitrarily by security forces and worried that his culture was under siege by the government.

The Turkish government denies charges of oppression and, in recent years, the national broadcaster has launched a Kurdish language station and economic investments have been directed towards the south-east.

"During the past four years, the Turkish government has heavily invested in developing a process where unprecedented and very bold steps that enhanced our democracy and the rule of law," said a senior Turkish official who spoke to The National on the condition of anonymity. "Cultural and social-economic grievances, particularly voiced by our citizens of Kurdish ethnic origin, have been addressed.Today, Kurds, as individual citizens of Turkey enjoy every democratic right and freedom."

But many Kurds, like Ronat, do not share that sentiment, instead feeling persecuted and dreaming of greater autonomy.

Last year, when Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobani came under siege by ISIL, the Turkish government raised the ire of Kurds in Turkey by not assisting in the fight and limiting the movement of Kurdish fighters.

Under international pressure, Ankara eventually allowed 160 soldiers from Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government's Peshmerga forces to transit through Turkey to join the battle. Coalition air strikes coordinated with Kurdish forces advancing on the ground eventually dislodged ISIL from the town six months ago.

However, many Kurds still believed Turkey wanted the extremists to counter Kurdish territorial gains along its southern border. In the Sonecek household, the battle became a focal point of conversations and a passionate obsession for Ronat.

Upset with the situation facing Kurds in Turkey and moved by the battle in Kobani, Ronat left home in March unannounced and became a fighter.

But Ronat did not die in Syria alongside Kurdish militants at war with ISIL. Nor did he die battling Turkish security forces in the streets of his hometown.

Instead, he died in Iraq, as a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militant in the remote Qandil Mountains. His family has not recovered his body.

Ronat's story is not unique. As the PKK and affiliated groups find themselves at war in every country where the Kurds have a sizeable population, fighters are moving from one conflict to another as borders become increasingly irrelevant to Kurdish militants.

At the same time, the lines demarcating the many groups that follow the secular, radical Kurdish nationalism embodied by the PKK are eroding.

The Kurdish political parties and militant organisations subscribing to the doctrines of the imprisoned PKK leader and founder Abdullah Ocalan are in open conflict in four countries today - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

The other major Kurdish power apart from the PKK axis is Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). While disagreeing ideologically with the PKK and a close economic partner with Turkey, the KRG has found itself fighting side-by-side with PKK forces against ISIL in Iraq.

The PKK affiliates are a confusing alphabet soup of acronyms.

There is the PKK - their youth arm and urban militia the YDG-H; the Syrian People's Protection Units commonly referred to as the YPG; the YPG's female-only sister militia the YPJ; the political umbrella for the YPG and YPJ called the PYD; and the Iranian Party for Free Life in Kurdistan or PJAK.

At first glance, the plethora of acronyms might hint at divisions among Kurdish militants. But in reality, they are closely aligned.

"I can almost say there is no difference between these groups. I want all these groups to be the same organisation one day: the PKK," said Ramzi Karakash, 54, a farmer in south-eastern Turkey and a PKK supporter who said he was willing to die for the Kurdish cause. "The ideas and the people are the same, only the regions are different."

While PKK supporters speak of the organisations as one, officially the PKK and the other groups play down their connections.

While Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist group, just across the border in northern Syria, the YPG has emerged as a friend and ally of the West.

With the US struggling to find moderate rebel groups willing to focus on their fight against ISIL, the YPG is the only effective, sizeable Syrian fighting force that directly co-ordinates its actions with the US-led coalition.

The PKK too has fought ISIL in Iraq and Syria, but this has not softened their terrorist designation by Turkey and the West.

Politically, ideologically and militarily, the PYD/YPG and the PKK are closely linked.

"The PKK and PYD are like father and son, there is an ideological relation and an organic relation," said Bayar Dosky, a lecturer at Iraq's American University Duhok Kurdistan. "One day the PYD will act on its own, however as a teenager, to survive it still needs its father's support."

A two-and-a-half-year ceasefire between the PKK and Turkey and a parallel peace process crumbled in July after the PKK began a brutal assassination campaign against members of Turkey's security forces. The campaign was retribution, they said, for a suicide bombing in the town of Suruc that the PKK blamed on the government, though the bombing is widely believed to have been carried out by ISIL. In response, the Turkish government moved aggressively against the PKK in south-eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq.

According to Turkish government figures, 116 members of its security forces and 30 civilians have been killed in PKK attacks between July 20 and September 14.

Some 2,000 PKK fighters have been killed during a similar period, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this month.

Mr Karakash, the farmer, spoke at a pro-PKK human shield camp situated on a hilltop between PKK and Turkish army positions in south-eastern Turkey's Lice district. The human shields said they were there to prevent the two sides from shooting at one another, though they maintained contact and friendly relations with nearby PKK fighters and identified as PKK supporters.

Entering the camp, visitors are not greeted by the flag of the PKK or the logo of the HDP - the pro-Kurdish Turkish political party to which many of the activists belong. Rather, they are met with the red flag of the YPJ, the all-female Syrian-Kurdish militia.

Nearby a second flag depicting the face of Ocalan flew above a rocky outcrop.

"The PKK is the one party for all Kurds," asserted Mehmet Dasli, a 33-year-old HDP member, as he sat in a cave at the site. "All these armed groups are controlled by the PKK."

Many PKK supporters say it is hypocritical that countries like the US back the YPG while condemning the PKK as a terrorist group.

"YPG is a Kurdish organisation in Syria and the whole world supports them because they are fighting ISIL. The PKK is fighting the Turkish government that supports ISIL," said Mr Dasli, expressing a widely held belief among Kurds about Turkey and ISIL. "The US should not label the PKK as terrorists. They should see the war in this country and they should do something."

Back in Silvan, the atmosphere at Ronat's funeral suggests that Kurdish militant groups will face little trouble gaining more recruits and that the current war with the Turkish government could be a long one.

"If Erdogan keeps going like this, even I can join the PKK. Everyone will join," said Ridvan Sonecek, Ronat's father.

foreign.desk@thenational