Source: The Patriot Light | AWK Network | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
A grand deal involving Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds is in the works, and on Thursday a historic announcement was made by the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Abdullah Ocalan, speaking from a Turkish prison, has called on the group that he founded to lay down its arms and disband. This is the result of years of running Turkish-PKK battles as well as fragile negotiations. The PKK has long been in an official state of war with the Turkish government, which considers it a terrorist organization.
“Convene your congress and make a decision,” Ocalan said in the statement, read aloud both in Kurdish and in Turkish. “All groups must lay down their arms and the P.K.K. must dissolve itself.”
Turkey’s war against the PKK, as well as the conflict’s extension into Syria and Iraq (the YPG/YPJ), has taken tens of thousands of lives. The crackdown on the PKK was its most intense in the 1990s. More recently and connected with the Syria crisis, Turkish warplanes have bombed Syrian Kurdish enclaves connected with the Rojava project.
“The rare message from Mr. Ocalan raised the possibility that a conflict that…
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