Some news media organizations repeatedly depict Turkey's operations against the outlawed PKK as a war against the Kurds, implying that Turkey is targeting Kurdish people and Kurdish groups. Well, it isn't. The anti-PKK operations that Turkey has been conducting are not targeting Kurdish people, and are not against Kurdish people. Using "the Kurds" to refer to the PKK, a militant organization designated as a terrorist group by Turkey as well as several state organizations including NATO and the EU, is just the same as using "the Arabs" or "the Muslims" to refer to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which is obviously misleading and not true.

Kurdish people are an ethnic group living in the Middle East, sharing the same language and cultural identity. The Kurds live in four different countries; southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northern Syria and northwestern Iran. It is estimated that they form a population between 20 and 40 million. Although Kurdistan, "the country of the Kurds," sometimes appears on maps, there is no such state recognized by international law. The closest thing that the Kurds have as a state is the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), or Iraqi Kurdistan. The KRG and current president of KRG, Massoud Barzani, has good relations with Ankara, while the PKK and Barzani, the commander-in-chief of the Peshmerga armed forces, as well as the leading Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraqi Kurdistan frankly hate each other. While the KDP have strong historical ties with Iran, even the most active Kurdish parties of Iran are not mentioned enough. Iranian-Kurdish activists or politicians become news only when they are executed by Iranian authorities, and unfortunately it happens a lot. In the meantime, there are 17 Kurdish parties in Syria. The most popular one, thanks to the United States choosing as an ally in the war against ISIS, is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK.

Among all Kurdish groups, Ankara is against the PKK only since it was founded in 1984 by Abdullah Öcalan, who is currently imprisoned on İmrali Island in Turkey, and armed against Turkey aiming to establish an independent state. However, the PKK has not fought with the Turkish state only, they also targeted Kurdish people who have not supported them.

For example, imagine that you are a farmer or a villager in the southeastern region of Turkey. A group of PKK militants come to your house holding guns in their hands and ask you to give them food, money, animals, or even your children to join their fight. If you refuse, you could easily be killed or called a traitor to the Kurdish movement. Of course, most of the Kurds supported political or activist movements that focused on Kurdish rights. The PKK could not gain as much sympathy as they said they could since the Kurds do not approve of the group's violent methods, including the killing of Kurds who opposed them or their Marxist-Leninist atheist repressive agenda. On the other hand, most of the Kurds are also not asking for an independent Kurdish state; they want to live in a peaceful democratic Turkey, but still quite a number of Kurdish people want to see some kind of self-ruling within the borders. That's why the political face of the Kurdish groups is so popular in Turkey. Pro-Kurdish parties like the current Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) gain strength when there is a peaceful atmosphere in the southeastern region of Turkey. But when the atmosphere changes, the PKK fills the vacuum and lays claim to the popularity of Kurdish political parties.

Lately, there is also another confusing factor between the religious and ethnic identity among the Kurds because of the sectarian face of the Syrian conflict and after the rise of ISIS. Even though, there are Kurds fighting in the fronts of ISIS, the PKK has pictured the fight between ISIS and the PKK as the fight between Islamists and the Kurds. Imprisoned PKK leader Öcalan has recently changed his antireligious and separatist rhetoric into a peaceful and reconciliatory one, especially after the start of Turkish-Kurdish peace process in 2013 to end the bloody conflict. In the meantime, Iraqi Kurds cooperated with Ankara driving the PKK out of northern Iraq. Syria, the country that was the PKK's strongest ally for years while not giving citizenship to the Syrian Kurds, decreased its support until the Syrian conflict began, but the spillover of the Syrian conflict has turned the tables.But, there is still hope. After all, the situation is not like it was in the late 1990s, although the cease-fire between the PKK and Ankara has ended. Since Turkey is not fighting with the Kurds, only the PKK, it will be over soon. The Kurds deserve that, and so does Ankara, which has sincerely been trying to make peace to end the years old conflict.