PKK won’t disarm, pull out of Turkish soil: Founder
A founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) says the group's fighters will neither lay down arms nor withdraw from Turkey as long as Ankara pushes ahead with its aerial raids in northern Iraq.
No one can force PKK militants “to disarm” and pull out of Turkey, Cemil Bayik, the vice chairman of the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) – a Kurdish political umbrella organization that the PKK is part of – told Belgium-based Kurdish-language Med Nuce television network on Thursday.
He noted that it is out of the question for PKK members to “walk out of” Turkey.
Although the KCK persuaded the PKK in the past to withdraw from the Turkish soil, the pullout had no positive effect on the peace process between the Kurdish forces and the Turkish government.
On August 6, Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), called on the international community to censure Ankara’s new “unjust war” on Kurds, accusing the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of using the so-called anti-Daesh fight as a cover to pursue its main goal of targeting the PKK and undermining the HDP.
Turkey recently launched airstrikes against purported Daesh targets in Syria as well as PKK positions in Iraq, after a deadly Daesh bomb attack left 32 people dead in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc, across the border from the northern Syrian town of Kobani.
A shaky ceasefire that had stood since 2013 was declared as null by the PKK following the Turkish airstrikes against the group, narrowing chances of the two sides reaching a deal in the near future.
The PKK had been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s. The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead.
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