Why Kurdish militancy went into retreat

Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, Aliza Marcus, NYU Press, £22

It is nearly 20 years since Aliza Marcus released Blood and Belief, her seminal book on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The ethnic Kurdish guerrilla group launched its separatist insurgency in eastern Turkey in the early 1980s, but by the early 21st century it looked fractured and anachronistic. Their leader, Abdullah Öcalan, had been captured and handed a death sentence by Turkey, stayed only by his call for the PKK to cease its violent campaign. For years after, the group was riven by in-fighting. After its 2003 congress, in which the remaining rump of the PKK adopted Öcalan’s professed newfound belief in democratic ideals, it reconstituted as an alphabet soup of groups and sub-groups, many of them civic rather than military.

Moreover, the whole world had changed around the PKK since its inception; the Cold War was over and communism, the bedfellow of its own Marxist-Leninist ideology, was defeated. The PKK appeared to be a throwback whose influence was on the wane, and whose only hope to stay relevant was to give up on its calls for an independent Kurdish state and engage in negotiations with Ankara. Its leadership had been largely banished to the remote mountains of northern Iraq.

Today, however, the PKK and its regional franchises run a quasi-state covering a third of Syria, have partnered with the US military in operations against ISIS, and are one of the most globally recognisable and admired fighting groups in the Middle East, with an international reputation that draws foreign supporters and even fighters to its cause. That has brought a fresh rush of interest in and commentary on the group over the past decade, much of it tainted by barely concealed enthusiasm for its ideology and methods.

But Marcus, with her unparalleled contacts within the PKK, expansive knowledge of both the group and the politics of the Middle East, and her journalistic and academic rigour, is in a unique position: able to penetrate and explain the group without proselytising for it. Most of her sources are former and often disillusioned PKK fighters – a rich source of information about a group that has spun layers of myth and obfuscation around itself.

Resurgence and Revolution, her new book on the PKK, offers a thorough grounding on the group’s origin stories in its early chapters, but its central focus is the period after 2011, when the start of the uprising against Syria’s president, Bashar al Assad, offered it an opportunity to expand its territory and clout. The story she tells in deep and meticulously-sourced detail, is of a group that, despite its apparent pivot towards democracy and peaceful methods, never abandoned its willingness to use violence, cult-like internal dynamics, and unbending obedience to Öcalan.

Having retreated to its bases in northern Iraq, the PKK pursued a two-pronged strategy throughout the 2000s, both studying and honing fighting methods while looking to shift its image and win international sympathy; they ‘used the ceasefire period as an opportunity to review their tactics’, Marcus writes. Attacks carried out on civilian targets in this period were claimed by front groups such as the ‘Kurdish Freedom Hawks’, or TAK, which were in fact directly controlled by the PKK. After 2004, when Kurds in the Syrian city of Qamishli rioted against the regime there, the PKK began sending both seasoned fighters and trained ideologues into the country to spread Öcalan’s ideas and recruit new members who had been politicised by the violence and oppression that Damascus meted out to its Kurdish minority.

By the time the Syrian Civil War erupted seven years later, the PKK had established an underground network in the Kurdish-majority northeast of the country, and it moved quickly to establish itself as the only Kurdish faction in the conflict. Yet rather than taking on the regime by joining with the armed uprising, the PKK decided to arrange a backroom détente with Assad. That was partly down to the Kurds’ distrust of the mainly Arab opposition movement, which quickly allied with Turkey and tolerated radical Islamist elements under its umbrella. But it also proved to be a canny move that allowed the PKK to emerge as an effective and, crucially, unified force while the main rebel groups collapsed into extremism and infighting.

When the black-flagged jihadis of ISIS turned their guns on the PKK’s Syrian franchise, known as the YPG, in the town of Kobani in late 2014, it marked a major turning point in the war. The US, already disillusioned with and moving away from the ragtag Syrian rebel groups, shifted its support to the Kurds, initially with airstrikes that saved Kobani from an ISIS takeover. Over the following months and years, that turned into a fully-fledged military alliance, which saw YPG troops on the ground providing co-ordinates for US airstrikes, and small numbers of American and British special forces deployed on the ground alongside the Kurdish fighters. As Washington sought to push back and defeat ISIS, it relied on the Kurdish fighters as its ground troops, avoiding the need to send regular US forces into another war in the Middle East.

In order to legitimise the partnership, Washington sought to rebrand the YPG and play down its PKK roots; the PKK is a listed terrorist organisation in the US, and Turkey, a NATO ally, was incensed by the possibility that American weapons might be supplied to a group that had caused tens of thousands of deaths on its soil. The group renamed itself the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, and started bringing Arab fighters into its ranks in a bid to claim that it represented all of Syria’s ethnic groups. That flimsy façade did little to hide the fact that the group’s highest-ranking fighters were all PKK veterans, and that the territory they controlled, known as Rojava, was being turned into a quasi-state centred around Öcalan’s ideas.

Even more problematically, the PKK grew hubristic on its successes in Syria and decided to relaunch its insurgency in eastern Turkey. With the breakdown of a ceasefire there in the summer of 2015, it ordered teenage fighters in urban centres to start building barricades and firing on Turkish security forces, believing that it was seizing the moment to establish full autonomy for the Turkish Kurds. Inevitably, the Turkish state’s fightback was swift and brutal. Across the region, whole towns and city districts were destroyed and thousands of people were killed. The PKK’s miscalculation in Turkey cost it much of the support from Kurdish communities that it had built up through its endeavours in Syria. It also revealed a fundamental truth: that the PKK had failed to recognise geopolitical realities, or to think beyond its methods of armed struggle.

Öcalan, meanwhile, had become an Oz-like figure, unseen in person for nearly two decades and speaking only through the political delegations and his lawyers who visited him on his island prison in the Sea of Marmara.

Any hopes that the PKK’s role in fighting extremism in Syria may win the group longer term Western backing was also quashed. By 2017, ISIS had been dislodged from its de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa, and by 2019 its self-declared caliphate was territorially finished. Yet the US then did little to prevent Turkey’s President Erdoğan from launching a series of cross-border offensives against the Kurdish quasi-state in Rojava. Marcus pinpoints the Turks’ seizure of the Kurdish territory of Afrin in 2018 as the moment when the PKK realised that the US would be its ally for only so long as it suited American needs. ‘For America, we were an opportunity’, a former high-ranking PKK commander tells Marcus.

It seems unlikely that any Kurdish group will unquestioningly partner with the US again in the near future; President Trump’s reported plans to use Iranian Kurdish militias in his war against the regime in Tehran quickly fizzled as it became clear that those fighters would not take part in any operation without American boots on the ground alongside them.

After 2020, Ankara stepped up its pressure on the PKK, using its homegrown armoured drone technology to target the group in northern Iraq and, after 2021, also in Syria. Meanwhile, in December 2024 Islamist rebels toppled Assad, leaving the Kurds in Rojava even more vulnerable to Turkish attacks; while the Kurds initially agreed to integrate into the new Syrian state, progress towards that has been slow and regularly knocked off course by outbreaks of fighting.

In 2025, with few other avenues left open, the PKK came full circle once again, with Öcalan issuing a call for his fighters to lay down their arms, and entering new peace negotiations with Ankara. Marcus ends on a note of optimism for the renewed peace process. ‘Belief drove the Kurdish fight for decades. Now it would drive peace, at least as long as Öcalan, and the rebels, believed in it,’ she writes.

The PKK is indeed a group that has, in many ways, proved itself adept at morphing along with the times, changing from a leftist, anti-imperialist force to an American ally on the battlefield. But its major error in relaunching its insurgency in Turkey in 2015 shows that it is still unsophisticated in many ways, overly reliant on the ideas and directions of a leader who has spent all of this century so far in prison, and far too optimistic about its prospects of international support. The PKK is also, at its core, a group that thrives in chaos, whether in porous borderlands where it controls and profits from smuggling, or in the ungoverned spaces of wartime Syria. It has yet to show that it can be as effective a force in times of stability.