02/27/2025 – 3:48 p.m.Reading time: 3 min.
The PKK has been fighting the Turkish state for 40 years. Founding father Öcalan continues to be a central figure.
The PKK founded the ÖCALAN from Southeast Anatolia in 1978 in the province of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey as Marxist -inspired organization. Their original goal was to build a socialist Kurdish state for the people suppressed in Turkey, whose relatives also live in Syria, Iraq and Iran. According to the Federal Center for Political Education, the Kurds are one of the largest peoples without their own nation state with over 30 million people worldwide.
In 1980 the military coup in Turkey forced the PKK and its leader into exile to Syria and Lebanon. In 1984 Öcalan called for the armed fight against the Turkish state to enforce his goals. The PKK acted primarily through guerrilla groups in Turkey and in the north of Iraq and Syria. A spiral of violence between PKK fighters and Turkish forces began, including tens of thousands of people, including many civilians.
When the Öcalan fled into exile in 1999 in Kenya arrested by the Turkish secret service, brought to Turkey and sentenced to death there, this gave the group a difficult blow. Öcalan escaped the execution by the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey, and since then he has been serving a lifelong prison on the IMralbul prison island.
The PKK later moved away from its original goal of its own Kurdish state. Today she wants to enforce political and cultural rights for the Kurds within the Turkish territory.
However, Öcalan’s reputation among the Kurds and its influence on the PKK with its several thousand fighters are unbroken. Both the PKK commanders who are entrenched in the northern Iraqi Kurdish area and the leading political representatives of the PKK in the European Exile still recognize Öcalan as the highest authority.
In Germany, the PKK with thousands of followers is by far the largest non-Islamist, extremist foreign organization. After several violent actions by the PKK in the German area and towards Turkish urges, the Interior Ministry issued a ban on activity in 1993.
Over the decades, the PKK announced several weapons resting, which, however, never lasted for long. On March 21, 2013, Öcalan called on the PKK to put up weapons-while MPs of the Pro-Kurdish party HDP-today-negotiated with the Islamic-Conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
At that time, Öcalan called for the withdrawal of the 1,500 to 2,000 Kurdish fighters from Turkey to give the peace process a chance. It was the first real ceasefire – but it didn’t last long. The ceasefire ended again in 2015 – after a fatal attack on Kurdish destinations near the Syrian border.
