{"id":14256,"date":"2025-12-26T22:25:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T21:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/?p=14256"},"modified":"2025-12-26T17:33:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:33:00","slug":"is-turkey-heading-toward-a-retreat-into-anatolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/is-turkey-heading-toward-a-retreat-into-anatolia\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Turkey Heading Toward a Retreat Into Anatolia?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The words spoken by the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah \u00d6calan, during his meeting with his nephew, parliamentarian \u00d6mer \u00d6calan, on October 23, 2024\u2014following a 44-month period of isolation imposed by the Turkish government\u2014can be considered the summation of his vision for Turkey and the state’s relationship with the Kurds. It also serves as an intuitive reading of the consequences of the ongoing armed conflict between the two parties since 1984. \u00d6mer \u00d6calan conveyed from the Kurdish leader an analysis of the transformations beginning to sweep the region and their impact on Turkey, in a message addressed to all concerned parties: whether those on the Turkish side betting on the military option to suppress the Kurdish people and continue denying their identity and eroding their rights, or those on the Kurdish side betting on armed struggle as the sole method to secure Kurdish rights and subjugate Turkey. \u00d6calan stated that should the Turkish state persist in its policy of denial and national assimilation toward the Kurds, while wagering on further war and military decisiveness, it will begin to decay and retreat into Anatolia\u2014effectively exiting the geography of Kurdistan\u2014but only after the entire region, “from Baghdad to Damascus, from Damascus to Mosul, and from Mosul to Erbil,” is subjected to dozens of wars similar to what Gaza has witnessed, implying the occurrence of horrific massacres after which Turkey would fracture and divide.<\/p>\n

\u00d6calan intended to point to the state of deadlock witnessed by Turkey, resulting from a narrow nationalist mentality based on the denial of Kurdish identity and the refusal to recognize the existence of a second founding component of the Republic. He pointed to the first part of the catastrophic scenario awaiting Turkey should it remain resistant to change and insistent on resorting to force and brutality in fighting the Kurds inside and outside its official borders. \u00d6calan said that confrontations and wars would extend throughout Turkey and its neighborhood, setting the region ablaze. These wars would only end with Turkey emerging exhausted and weak, possibly losing parts of its current geography and being forced to shrink and isolate within Anatolia\u2014all due to its rejection of peace and democratic political solution efforts, and its continued reliance on martial solutions and the logic of arms. He added that external parties would intervene if Turkey persists in rejecting calls for solution and settlement, and that Kurdish forces could emerge who choose to cooperate with the outside.<\/p>\n

\u00d6calan addressed these words to the fanatical Turkish nationalist mind, which still views the Kurd as a “security file” posing a threat to Turkey and its unity, and which has become stumbled in the blindness of its nervousness and vanity as it sees major transformations occurring in the region\u2014on one hand, the American military presence establishing ongoing changes in maps, and on the other, the escalation and Israeli prowess. (At that time, Israel had struck the structures of the Hamas movement in Gaza, assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, destroyed Hezbollah’s power, detonated pagers among its cadres, assassinated symbols of the Radwan Force, and killed the party leader Hassan Nasrallah and his successor Hashem Safieddine). This prowess formed a shock to Turkey and its projects of hegemony and expansion in spheres of influence (Neo-Ottomanism, Misak-\u0131 Mill\u00ee, Blue Homeland, etc.), which it sought to achieve based on military superiority and \u201cbullying.”<\/p>\n

\u00d6calan addressed the mind of the Turkish state and those who consider themselves “patriots transcending partisan interests”\u2014the owners and protectors of the state\u2014conveying to them the possibility of disintegration and shrinkage into the narrow Anatolian region, and consequently the loss of vast areas of the Turkish Republic. \u00d6calan struck the nerve of those in charge of the Republic\u2019s “status quo” and the guardians of the state and its borders, but he also poured cold water on those aspiring to expand and revive imagined imperial projects\u2014those they claim will crown Turkey as a major power in the region. \u00d6calan placed these individuals on the “chair of truth” in the face of a reality taking shape that dispels all their dreams of expansion and making a “Greater Turkey,” threatening them instead with downsizing, retreat, and the loss of parts of their state.<\/p>\n

This is a reality whose features are being defined by the strikes of the Israeli war machine, which since October 7, 2023, has been unleashed without deterrent, bombing, destroying, and proceeding to draw borders of influence and control, setting the features of a “New Middle East” map. \u00d6calan made those in charge of the state understand that equations are changing rapidly and that the “Century of Turkey” will only be achieved through rebuilding the ancient historical alliance between Kurds and Turks\u2014the two founding components of the Republic\u2014and through the recognition of the identity and rights of the Kurdish people and the lifting of the grievances that have afflicted the sons of this people for a hundred years of the unitary Republic, which was established on the denial of their identity and rights and practiced policies of national assimilation through various methods\u2014sometimes flexible (cultural) and at other times harsh (genocides and massacres). Consequently, there must be an abandonment of the mentality of “drying up the entire lake to eliminate the fish,” as the great Kurdish\/Turkish novelist Ya\u015far Kemal once said.<\/p>\n

On the Kurdish side, \u00d6calan informed those Kurdish voices that reject dialogue and negotiation\u2014according to the strategy of “Peace and Democratic Society” which he developed and presented as an antidote for both Turkey and the Kurds\u2014that the scenario of confrontations and war, whose second part might end with the dismantling of Turkey and the retreat of state control to within Anatolia (which creates a sense of euphoria among these voices), will not occur except after the completion of the first part of this scenario: the occurrence of immense slaughters and massacres equivalent to “fifty Gazas,” with millions of innocent Kurds in Turkey and its neighborhood as victims. Kurdish opponents of the dialogue and negotiation phase, from the two aforementioned trends, proceed from old and fixed narratives that do not take into account changes and the balance of power, but rather go toward a naive bet on the outside\u2014unlike the Kurdish movement which relies on its own forces and the capabilities of the Kurdish people. This trend fears the “melting” of Kurdish nationalism and the “loss” of Kurdistan within the structures of the Turkish state, without the slightest knowledge of \u00d6calan’s thought or the method and history of his management of the conflict with Turkey, and without any familiarity with the national awakening brought about by the struggle of the PKK and the ideas, visions, and instructions of \u00d6calan in Kurdistan.<\/p>\n

An observer of the Kurdish situation in Turkey will notice the significant development and rise of Kurdish parties that form the political front for the PKK. It is enough to know that the main Kurdish party previously was forced to ally with Turkish leftist and democratic parties to enter parliament, certain that it would not cross the 10% threshold (the threshold was reduced to 7% in 2022). Now, however, it crosses the threshold with ease, representing the absolute parliamentary majority in the provinces of Kurdistan, and possessing the third-largest parliamentary bloc in all of Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u00d6calan is the founder of the idea of forming the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) in 2014, the local party tasked with organizing Kurdish ranks in the provinces of Kurdistan and supervising the care of Kurdish culture and language. This party bolsters its larger sister party, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Parti), with Kurdish votes by focusing on purely nationalist Kurdish segments within and outside the known solid base, supervising contacts with small nationalist Kurdish parties and consulting with them, and establishing local alliances in various elections. The party is also active in contacting social sectors and forces that state parties managed to win over and influence (segments of the Arab component, Kurdish tribes whose chiefs and Aghas were bought by the state, the support bases of the Village Guards, etc.) to ensure their votes and involve their elites in the Kurdish political movement. This local party played a major role in achieving a historic victory for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (which was later banned) in the parliamentary elections held in June 2015, when the party won 50 parliamentary seats in 14 Kurdish provinces, compared to only 9 for the ruling Justice and Development Party. The Kurdish movement realizes that the issue of the historical and geographical existence of Kurdistan is one of the constants that must be consolidated in the consciousness and lives of Kurds, as well as in the general political, cultural, and social situation throughout Turkey, becoming an acknowledged axiom. \u00d6calan resorted to including the term “Kurdistan” in the titles of all his intellectual pleadings in which he spoke about the democratic society and the democratic nation.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Anatolia in 1630, a historical map from the geographic atlas of Gerardus Mercator | AFP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00d6calan considers armed struggle a means of pressuring the Turkish state to change its policies toward the Kurds and accept dialogue and negotiation, rather than an end in itself. Since 1993, \u00d6calan has consistently declared unilateral ceasefires on numerous occasions, accompanying them with peace initiatives all based on finding political solutions to the Kurdish issue within a democratic state for all its components, and ending the official approach based on denial and security-military treatment. \u00d6calan has always bet on coexistence and redefining the historical relationship between the Kurdish and Turkish components, rejecting all external projects and attempts by some powers to use the Kurds as tools to undermine Turkey or extract concessions from it. Perhaps the interview conducted by Turkish journalist Fatih Altayl\u0131 with \u00d6calan in 1997 (recently revealed after a 28-year ban) clarifies the reality of the constants that \u00d6calan and the PKK have adhered to from the beginning: peace, a democratic solution, and coexistence, provided there is recognition and acknowledgment of identity and rights. In that interview, \u00d6calan told Turkey’s leaders at the time: “The PKK is not an obstacle to peace. Let the dialogue begin, and we will work to silence the weapons by tomorrow.” Hence, \u00d6calan\u2019s narrative has not changed; he awaits opportunities to silence the sound of weapons and push the state toward dialogue and a solution to build a state of rights and citizenship\u2014a state that recognizes the two main components that founded the Republic and were in an alliance and cooperation for a thousand years, sharing the same geography and history.<\/p>\n

It is not true that the PKK lost the battle militarily, or that it weakened and its capacity for resistance and steadfastness declined, forcing it to accept what Turkey dictated. This is a deficient narrative contradicted by reality. It was the Turkish state that initiated contact with \u00d6calan and invited him for dialogue and a peaceful solution, recognizing him as a representative of the Kurds and admitting the failure of its war policies (notably Devlet Bah\u00e7eli\u2019s call in the Turkish Parliament on October 22, 2024, inviting \u00d6calan to come to Parliament, speak before the DEM Party bloc, and announce the end of the armed struggle; and the remarks by Numan Kurtulmu\u015f, Speaker of the Turkish Parliament, regarding Turkey losing $2 trillion in its war against the PKK). \u00d6calan and the party led the war with steadfastness and competence despite great sacrifices, in order to reach that moment when the state requests dialogue and offers a peaceful solution and the laying down of arms\u2014which is what they had been offering throughout the previous years. Practically and in the field, the PKK held together with clear professionalism against Turkish attacks and devised new methods for lightning guerrilla warfare. It also worked on fortifying its positions, establishing a vast and complex network of tunnels and bunkers in the Qandil Mountains that enabled its fighters to move with flexibility and smoothness, delivering lightning strikes and ambushes against Turkish military sites, camps, and bases before returning to their strongholds. Furthermore, the PKK achieved two significant breaches of tight Turkish security measures, delivering two precise strikes in the heart of the Turkish interior.<\/p>\n

The first breach was the storming by party fighters of the security directorate headquarters near the Turkish Parliament building in the Kizilay area of the capital, Ankara, on October 1, 2023. The second came a year later when two fighters managed to storm the headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSA\u015e) on October 25, 2024. These two attacks served as a message to Ankara to prove the party’s ability to strike in the most fortified and sensitive locations deep within Turkey, using methods and techniques that military and government intelligence could not detect. However, the most significant military transformation\/achievement for the PKK remains its announcement during the Kurdish national Newroz celebrations in 2024 that it had acquired technology capable of shooting down Turkish drones of all types (Akinci, Bayraktar TB2, ANKA-S)\u2014drones that were considered the pride of the Turkish military industry and from which Ankara earned hundreds of millions of dollars. The PKK\u2019s development of a technology capable of neutralizing the Turkish army’s drones dealt a blow to the ambitions of Turkish military industries and prompted many countries and organizations to reconsider the effectiveness and efficiency of drone warfare and the overall output of the Turkish military industry. Turkish weaponry lost its luster and reputation, and various parties began to hesitate in acquiring weapons for which an armed organization had developed a counter-measure, affecting its efficacy and its ability to remain stealthy and destructive.<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, the PKK\u2019s abandonment of armed action and its transition to political work in Turkey\u2014along with the state beginning to change its laws, introducing constitutional reforms, stopping campaigns of repression, prohibition, prosecution, and harassment, ending the filing of lawsuits, putting a stop to the confiscation of municipalities in the provinces of Kurdistan through the appointment of trustees, lifting restrictions on organizational work, and releasing thousands of politicians\u2014will double the strength of the Kurds and their political presence in their historical regions and throughout Turkey. This will be achieved by relying on Kurdish votes first (more than 7 million Kurds in Istanbul alone, who provide the Kurdish political party with approximately half a million votes) and on internal alliances with Turkish democratic forces.<\/p>\n

\u00d6calan always emphasizes the necessity of building a national front at the country level, capable of bringing about democratic transformation, building a state of citizenship and law, and fighting the corruption led by war oligarchies and power centers that control the economy and media. Consequently, this would enable the country to rid itself of the state of dependency on the outside and the phobia of partition. Demolishing racist nationalist thought and building a pluralistic identity through \u00d6calan\u2019s “Peace and Democratic Society” project will save Turkey and its peoples from the “map-changing” scheme and grant them freedom and hope. It will also correct the historical relationship spanning a thousand years between Kurds and Turks, rebuilding the Republic on the basis of the alliance and presence of the two founding components. Until that happens, or even as it begins to be realized, \u00d6calan considers the struggle for peace and the achievement of a democratic society to be continuous without weakness or interruption. The current stage requires vigilance and readiness from everyone, and the steadfastness of every Kurd in the sites of struggle and resistance, just as “a soldier stands vigilant, cautious, and firm in his trench,” as conveyed by his nephew, the young parliamentarian \u00d6mer Mehmet \u00d6calan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The words spoken by the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah \u00d6calan, during his meeting with his nephew, parliamentarian \u00d6mer \u00d6calan, on October 23, 2024\u2014following a 44-month period of isolation imposed by the Turkish government\u2014can be considered the summation of his vision for Turkey and the state’s relationship with the Kurds. It also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1249,"featured_media":14257,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,61],"tags":[142,43,198,50,36],"ppma_author":[904],"class_list":["post-14256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-slider","tag-abdullah-ocalan","tag-kurdistan","tag-peoples-democratic-party","tag-pkk","tag-turkey"],"authors":[{"term_id":904,"user_id":1249,"is_guest":0,"slug":"tariq-hamo","display_name":"Tariq Hemo","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Tariq-Hamo-2.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Tariq-Hamo-2.jpg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14259,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14256\/revisions\/14259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14256"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}