Sep 1, 2015

Escalating violence between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) reflects yet another broken cease-fire in the 30-year conflict. Turkey has recommenced a cross-border bombing campaign and declared martial law in its southeastern Kurdish region while the PKK has relaunched deadly attacks against Turkish forces, institutions and assets. Still, this round of violence reflects a more protracted PKK problem. The PKK now controls its own deep-state institutions and satellite groups across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran and has been empowered in the fight against the Islamic State (IS). It has become as much a trans-border Kurdish nationalist movement as it is a terrorist group. Any attempt to effectively counter the PKK will require dis-embedding it from Kurdish society and increasing the costs of conflict beyond a military campaign.

Those who lived through the 1990s in Turkey have reason to worry about the renewed violence. During that period, southeastern Turkey was a deadly battle zone, defined by mass killings, extra-judicial arrests, torture, population displacements and full-scale destruction of towns and villages by the Turkish military and PKK militants. In those days, you could hear and see the nightly bombardments that lit the sky from the Iraqi Kurdish border town of Zakho. Violence was driven by xenophobic nationalisms: Turkey’s refusal to recognize and respect Kurdish ethnic identity and the PKK’s radical agenda that sought nothing less than an independent Kurdish state.

Still, Ankara could count on superior military capabilities and strong regional allies to help quell the PKK. In northern Iraq, it conducted cross-border raids of PKK militants — an agreement negotiated with Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War and tolerated by the newly created Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Ankara also cut PKK support from Tehran and Damascus, especially its bases, training facilities and networks in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley. The 1998 Ankara agreement not only ended the Assad government’s backing of the PKK, but led to its expulsion from Syria, capture and imprisonment of its leader Abdullah Ocalan, and declaration of a “unilateral PKK cease-fire,” which lasted from 1999 to 2004.

Having been virtually incapacitated, what explains the PKK’s resilience and revival? The PKK has directly benefited from the fragmented Iraqi and Syrian states and their ungoverned spaces. After having been expelled from Syria, the PKK found a new base in the Qandil Mountains, then part of an international safe haven in Iraqi Kurdistan, where it has developed and deepened institutional networks within a larger Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) that includes offshoots in Syria (Democratic Union Party, or PYD), Iran (Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, PJAK), and Iraq (Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, or PCDK) alongside its armed wing, the People's Defense Forces (HPG).

These PKK-Kurdish nationalist networks have expanded and have been reinforced in the campaign against IS. Since 2014, PKK forces have been effectively fighting IS in Iraq alongside Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Iranian Quds forces, Shiite militias, Iraqi security forces and Yazidi fighters. In Syria, PYD forces have been battling radical Islamic groups even longer, since the civil war started in 2011, and continue to serve as coalition local partners against IS.