PKK ends its unilateral ceasefire with Turkey, threatens wide attacks

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended a unilateral ceasefire with Turkey on Tuesday which it had announced after a devastating earthquake hit Turkey and Syria on 6 February.

The Executive Council Co-Presidency of the Kurdistan Community Union (KCK), an umbrella political organisation for Kurdish groups including the PKK, vowed widescale attacks after Ankara allegedly continued strikes on its members.

The PKK is considered a banned terrorist organisation in Turkey, Europe and the US.

"The attacks and killings by the Turkish state continued and the isolation of Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan was aggravated during the unilateral ceasefire," the KCK statement claimed on Tuesday.

It claimed its initial ceasefire was based on "humanitarian and moral responsibilities" after the devastating Turkey-Syria earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and that it had extended the truce during Turkish presidential elections.

Very worrying news:

The #KCK (the umbrella body representing the #PKK's regional structures) has declared an end to its ceasefire with #Turkey.

Depending on how the #PKK resumes attacks, this could place the U.S. under considerable pressure in NE #Syria, alongside the #SDF. pic.twitter.com/SpYzIByES9

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) June 13, 2023

Despite this, the Turkish government continued its attacks throughout the four-month ceasefire and escalated its assaults on the PKK fighters based in the Qandil Mountains of the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

The KCK claimed that Turkish forces also attacked civilians in Sinjar and Makhmour and launched military operations against the self-declared Kurdish administration in North East Syria.

The PKK decided to end its truce after Hüseyin Arasan, a member of the Mesopotamia Workers' Organisation, close to the Kurdish militant group, was shot in Sulaymaniyah on 10 June and died at a hospital 17 hours later.

Local Kurdish activists claimed Turkish intelligence services were behind the killing.

The KCK said that after the killing of Baran Avrêl (Hüseyin Arasan) in Sulaymaniyah it decided to end to truce.

Turkey’s Daily Sabah on Wednesday claimed that MIT has killed Abdulkahar Karasaçb (Alişer Çiya), a member of the PKK’s special forces, in northern Iraq.  

The PKK was formed in the late 1970s by its now imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan and has fought a four-decade bloody war against the Turkish state demanding greater autonomy or independence.

Its bloody conflict with Ankara has left at least 40,000 people dead since 1984, many of them civilians.