This Week in Northern Syria [9.2025]

February 26 - March 4: Öcalan's message, the interim constitutional committee, and more...

Ramadan Mubarak… in case you missed it check out my recent list of SCG ministerial and provincial appointees here

On February 27th a seven member delegation from Turkey’s Left/Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) visited PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan on the prison island of İmralı, his home for the last quarter century. Upon returning to the mainland the seven held a press conference in Istanbul where they read a message from Öcalan in both Kurdish and Turkish. The letter, entitled “The Call for Peace and Democratic Society,” concludes with the declaration that “all groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”

A picture of the delegation meeting Abdullah Öcalan at the İmralı maximum security prison (source)

This event was culmination of six months of talks spearheaded on the Turkish side by MHP head Devlet Bahçeli, presumably on behalf of his coalition partner President Erdoğan. While this has been termed a new ‘peace process’ it bears little resemblance to failed talks that took place between 2013-2015, instead appearing as an attempt on the part of the Turkish state to force the PKK to surrender. In both instances the negotiations served strategic purposes for Erdoğan. In the aughts the peace process was part of Erdoğan’s war against the Kemalist military elite, today commentators tie the outreach to both Erdoğan’s attempts to fracture the opposition in pursuit of changing the constitution and as an effort to safegaurd Turkey against Israel and possible adversary Iran in the new post-Oct 7th, post-Asad regional landscape.

The details are all rather vague but provided this statement plays out in reality it appears that Turkey has succeeded in getting Öcalan to disband the PKK in exchange for practically nothing. There is seemingly no framework in place and Öcalan remains isolated from PKK leadership, so it remains to be seen whether the heft of the Öcalan personality cult and the PKK’s declining military capcity will outweigh the farcical nature of the process. Two days after the press conference the HPG - the PKK’s armed wing - announced a unilateral ceasefire, though the Turkish military has reportedly continued attacks on the militants in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Thousands gathered in Kobani under Öcalan flags to watch a televised broadcast of the DEM press conference (source)

Given the DAANES’s obvious but obfurscated ties to the PKK this announcement and what follows will have significant ramifications across northern Syria…