Turkish authorities have captured 269 suspected members of the PKK terrorist group in connection to a banned pro-PKK rally in southeastern Diyarbakır province, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Tuesday.
The suspects were detained in raids across 36 provinces, including Istanbul, Antalya, Hakkari and Diyarbakır, before the rally announcement.
They all have criminal records for partaking in past illegal street rallies that included throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at security forces, organizing protests to remove the so-called isolation and they have photographs with PKK’s high-ranking members, Yerlikaya said on X.
Separately, some 47 social media users are facing legal action for making pro-PKK posts and attempting to attend a rally organized by the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) in Diyarbakır on Sunday and banned by the city governorate, are facing legal action, Yerlikaya added.
DEM Party is the successor of the PKK-affiliated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
Police discovered 13 other social media users, including seven DEM Party lawmakers who shared pictures of PKK ringleader Abdullah Öcalan. Public displays of the PKK symbols or Öcalan’s pictures are banned in Türkiye.
One of the suspects was arrested for spreading terrorist propaganda on social media about the rally and four other suspects were released on probation.
“Provocative and violence-praising terrorist propaganda will not be tolerated,” Yerlikaya said.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 to achieve a so-called Kurdish self-rule in southeastern regions and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the United States and the European Union.
Its bloody terror campaign has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people in the country since then. Kurdish residents in southeastern provinces suffered the brunt of PKK violence, losing children and loved ones to forced recruitment, their homes to bombing strikes, and regional peace to the PKK’s brutality and harsh state measures to contain it.
The conflict with the PKK is now more focused on the mountains of northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)-administered region, where the PKK militants have their headquarters in Qandil, which sits roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of the Turkish border in Irbil, but the terrorists still maintain hideouts in southeastern Türkiye.
In addition to implementing a series of reforms to strengthen Kurdish rights neglected by post-Ottoman administrations, the Turkish government sought to put an end to the violence and start a “reconciliation” process with the PKK in 2013, but negotiations broke down in 2015 when the group resumed attacks, leading to a resurgence of violence across the southeast.
Also in 2015, DEM Party’s predecessor, HDP, and PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the YPG, effectively undermined the efforts by inciting riots in provinces with predominantly Kurdish populations dubbed the “Kobani riots” in which clashes between pro-PKK groups and security forces killed 31 and injured hundreds.
The reconciliation process was brought to the fore earlier this month when Devlet Bahçeli, the head of the government’s main ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), shook hands with the DEM Party’s co-chairs during the reopening of Parliament on Oct. 1.
His subsequent remarks were interpreted by pundits as the resumption of the reconciliation process, but Bahçeli and top MHP figures insist they were simply a gesture toward more political unity in Türkiye amid the growing security threat from Israel.
DEM Party’s acting parliamentary group chair Sezai Temelli on Monday played down the thaw in Turkish politics and said: “If a new process begins, it should begin with talks with Imralı,” referring to an island near Istanbul where Öcalan has been jailed since 1999.
Temelli said the DEM Party was ready to take upon responsibility for a new reconciliation process, while Gülistan Koçyiğit, acting parliamentary group co-chair of the party, said Imralı had a facilitating role in ensuring “peace.”
Koçyiğit added that a simple handshake or greeting to DEM Party co-chairs would not “produce a reconciliation process.”
“Türkiye has experience on this matter and knows what steps should be taken,” she said.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week defined Bahçeli’s outreach to the DEM Party as a positive step in Türkiye’s democratic process, noting Bahçeli’s step “cannot be put aside.”
