ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Wednesday said that they want the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to disarm "in the coming months." It also denied a meeting recently took place between Ankara and Kurdish authorities in Syria.
“We want to see concrete, comprehensive progress in the delivery of these weapons within a time frame in the coming months,” said AKP spokesperson Omer Celik during a high-level party meeting.
The PKK announced its dissolution and an end to its four-decade armed struggle on May 12, responding to a call from jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan to end the armed fight and pursue a political and democratic path.
Referring to the SDF - the de facto army of northeast Syria (Rojava) - and Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an Iran-based armed group widely believed to be an offshoot of the PKK, Celik said that Turkey expects them to be “dissolved with all its branches, extensions, and illegal structures and disarmed”.
In May, Amir Karimi, PJAK co-chair, told Aryen TV, a Sweden-based channel affiliated with Iran-based Kurdish political parties, that the group will continue its armed struggle against Tehran despite the PKK’s decision to dissolve itself.
PJAK operates from bases in the Kurdistan Region’s Mount Qandil, where the PKK is also headquartered. The group has clashed with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and is banned in Iran, which designates PJAK and similar groups as terrorist organizations.
Meanwhile, Mazloum Abdi, commander-in-chief of the SDF, said on Friday that they have established "direct" contact with Turkish authorities and said he is open to meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Responding to the claims that there is contact with the SDF, Celik said, “There has been no meeting between Turkey and the SDF.”
Ankara has, for years, considered the SDF a security threat. It accused the US-backed force of having ties with the PKK through its backbone - the People’s Protection Units (YPG) - and carried out several major military campaigns against it since 2016.
When Syrian rebels made their push for Damascus to oust Bashar al-Assad last December, Turkey and the Syrian militia groups it supports intensified their attacks on the SDF in the north, mainly around the strategic Tishreen Dam, but failed to make significant advances. The SDF reportedly agreed to allow Damascus-affiliated forces to be positioned near the dam to create a buffer zone between them and the Ankara-backed Syrian National Army (SNA).
The SDF also signed a March 10 agreement with Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a pact that Ankara endorsed in an apparent softening of its tone towards the force. Erdogan has urged Sharaa to speed up the integration of the SDF into Syria's army - as stipulated in the deal.
Updated on June 5, 2025.
