Turkey-PKK conflict: five key dates

Turkey's vote on a limited amnesty bill for some PKK militants follows decades of conflict involving the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Turkish state.

The PKK was formed in 1978 by Ankara University students with Marxist-Leninist roots and a goal of Kurdish liberation through armed struggle. Abdullah Ocalan, then a political science student, became its leader.

After Turkey's 1980 military coup, the PKK and Ocalan moved to Syria and Lebanon. The group began armed struggle in 1984, with militants training in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley and attacking Turkish military posts and convoys. Turkey responded with military action, and violence was concentrated in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

Ocalan was forced to leave Syria in 1998 after Ankara threatened Damascus over its backing for the PKK. He was arrested in Kenya on February 15, 1999, flown to Turkey and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002 as Turkey moved to abolish the death penalty during European Union-backed reforms.

In March 2013, Ocalan urged the PKK to lay down arms as part of talks with the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister and now president. That truce collapsed in July 2015 after a deadly bombing in Suruc near the Syrian border.

Turkey then bombed PKK targets in Iraq and carried out a military offensive at home, while the PKK responded with urban warfare. Clashes in the southeast, including Diyarbakir, left a lasting legacy for local communities.

In 2025, after indirect talks facilitated by the pro-Kurdish DEM party, Ocalan called on PKK fighters to disband and lay down weapons. The PKK announced its dissolution on May 12, and several dozen leaders later joined a symbolic ceremony in northern Iraq where they began destroying weapons.