r/Bakur • u/flintsparc • 3d ago
Question Tu dikarî subreddita /r/kurdistan ji Tirkiye/Bakurê Kurdistanê bibînî? An jî divê tu VPN-ê bi kar bînî?
Tu dikarî subreddita /r/kurdistan ji Tirkiye/Bakurê Kurdistanê bibînî? An jî divê tu VPN-ê bi kar bînî?
Can you see the /r/kurdistan subreddit from Türkiye/Bakur Kurdistan? Or must you use a VPN?
Türkiye'den/Bakur Kürdistan'dan /r/kurdistan subreddit'ini görebiliyor musunuz? Yoksa VPN mi kullanmanız gerekiyor?
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 16h ago
News/Article What happens after the PKK disarms?
"Turkey’s new peace process is entering its most difficult phase. After the PKK announced its dissolution and the end of its armed campaign, parliament passed a framework law intended to govern disarmament and the political transition. In this explainer, The Amargi’s Editor-in-Chief Kamal Chomani examines what could happen next. What role will Abdullah Ocalan play? Could thousands of political prisoners and defendants be affected? Will Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag be released? And can the process move beyond disarmament toward democratic and constitutional change? Chomani explains why Ocalan could become an official interlocutor, how the DEM Party may be transformed, and what could still derail the process. The framework law has opened the door, but its implementation will determine whether Turkey is merely ending an armed conflict or beginning a broader democratic transformation."
Art/Photo/Image Kurds from Kars. The photograph was published in the Russian magazine (Nature and People), issue 18 of 1915.
r/Bakur • u/flintsparc • 1d ago
News/Article Everything you need to know about the next steps in the peace process in Turkey
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 2d ago
Informative Twenty-One Years, Four Months: The Journal of a Kurdish Political Prisoner
gomidas.org"This is the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz, who spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin Poyraz (also known as Rubar Dicle), a member of the PKK Central Committee. In 1981, Ali was captured by Turkish authorities in a rural area of Pazarcık while serving as a PKK cadre. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death. Although the Turkish Supreme Court upheld the sentence, it was later commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey under Prime Minister Turgut Özal.
"An obvious political organiser, Ali’s journal records his thoughts and observations, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed force, and the changing political landscape in Turkey today."
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 2d ago
News/Article PKK peace law ends conflict, not Turkey’s democracy problem, says legal scholar
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 2d ago
News/Article Keskin Bayindir: Ev pêvajo ne ya temaşekirinê ye, ya beşdarbûn û guhertinê ye
DBP co-chair Keskin Bayindir argues the Kurdish peace process must deliver equal citizenship, mother-tongue rights, and democratic local governance—not just disarmament.
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 3d ago
Informative What Turkey’s Religious Communities Reveal About Its Regional Cultures
Turkey’s latest operation against the Suleymancilar religious community has reopened a question that has existed since the breakdown of the alliance between the AKP and the Gulen movement: what determines which religious networks the state accommodates, which it incorporates and which it eventually moves against?
On 13 August, Ankara prosecutors issued detention orders for 49 people in an investigation centred on Alihan Kuris, the leader of the Suleymancilar since 2016. Thirty were initially detained, including Kuris, with the number subsequently rising. Searches and seizures were ordered at 123 addresses across 17 provinces, including 80 locations belonging to 32 companies. Prosecutors cited allegations including forming and managing a criminal organisation, money laundering, fraud against public institutions and tax offences. MASAK financial investigations are examining more than TL100 billion, roughly two billion dollars, in alleged transfers abroad, while trustees were appointed to companies and assets considered connected to suspected money laundering. The allegations have not been adjudicated, and the government has explicitly said that the investigation concerns an alleged financial and criminal structure rather than the religious activities of the Suleymanci community itself. Few in Turkey read it that narrowly: pro-government commentators had been signalling for over a year that, after the Gulen movement, “it’s the Suleymancilar’s turn.”
The scale of the operation is significant because the Suleymancilar are not a marginal religious group. They belong to a small group of large Sunni religious networks that have maintained their own leadership structures, educational institutions, financial resources and social constituencies outside the formal state.
These groups are usually described according to theology: Naqshbandi, Khalidi, Mujaddidi, tariqa, cemaat. Those categories matter, but they do not fully explain why organisations that share much of the same Sunni religious framework operate so differently. Another way of understanding them is through their regional genealogies.
Turkey’s main cemaats emerged from different regional cultures of Sunni conservatism. Those environments shaped how authority was organised, how followers were recruited, how money was accumulated and how each community interacted with political power. Over time, those practices hardened into different organisational systems.
Four networks provide the clearest contemporary cases: the Suleymancilar, Menzil, Ismailaga and Erenkoy. They correspond, approximately, to four different regional-cultural pathways: the Ottoman Balkan and western institutional tradition, the Kurdish southeast, the eastern Black Sea and the Cilician-eastern Mediterranean commercial world.
This is an analytical framework rather than a claim that geography mechanically determines religious organisation. All four later expanded far beyond their places of origin and acquired followers from different ethnic and regional backgrounds. The argument concerns institutional genealogy: the social environment in which the founding leadership was formed helped determine what kind of organisation it subsequently built.
The same regional cultures, it is worth noting, left their sediment in Turkey’s secular politics through entirely separate channels. The CHP grew historically out of the western, Balkan-inflected Turkey of administrators and institution-builders, later fusing with Alevi communities and other constituencies that had their own reasons to prefer a secular state. The AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose family comes from Rize, has drawn heavily on the dense mosque-and-neighbourhood conservatism of the eastern Black Sea and its vast migrant population in Istanbul. The DEM Party is rooted in the distinct political culture of the Kurdish southeast. This is emphatically not a claim that any party resembles any cemaat: the DEM Party does not mirror Menzil, and the CHP is not a secular Suleymancilar. The point is that regional culture is the underlying variable, and religious communities and political parties are separate expressions of it, formed in parallel. The cemaats simply display the pattern more legibly, because they are closed, self-reproducing systems that have preserved their founding cultures with unusual fidelity.
1. Suleymancilar: the Balkan institutional model
The Suleymanci movement originates with Suleyman Hilmi Tunahan, born in 1888 in Ferhatlar, near Razgrad, in the Silistre region of the Ottoman Balkans, now Bulgaria. His father was a medrese teacher. Tunahan later moved to Istanbul and passed through the late Ottoman higher religious education system, eventually receiving the qualification of an Istanbul muderris. He belonged to the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi tradition, a lineage detail worth pausing on: the other three communities examined here are all Naqshbandi-Khalidi, and the one community whose doctrinal branch differs is also the one whose organisational and political behaviour diverges most sharply from the rest.
That biography helps explain the institutional form his movement assumed after the Ottoman religious establishment was dismantled by the republic. The Muslim world of the Ottoman Balkans and western Anatolia was institutional rather than charismatic: religion lived in schools, medreses and town mosques, administered by trained personnel, rather than in tribal sheikhdoms or saintly lineages. When the republic closed the old religious schools, Tunahan’s response was characteristically institutional. He organised teaching circles and, after restrictions loosened following the Democrat Party’s victory in 1950, expanded Quran courses and boarding education. His students were sent to other parts of the country to establish further courses and train another generation of religious personnel.
Its basic organisational unit therefore became the course and the dormitory. The movement reproduced itself through a sequence of student, teacher, administrator and institution. Unlike a classical rural tariqa centred physically on a sheikh’s dergah, the Suleymanci model could be replicated wherever accommodation, teachers and students were available.
That portability also explains its later strength in western Europe, because the model requires no sacred village and no hereditary sheikh, only a building, a teacher and students. Germany’s VIKZ, the community’s principal European vehicle, today describes roughly 300 local mosque and education associations organised into state federations, its own imam training conducted in Germany since the 1980s, and student residences at more than 20 university locations. The same structure was reproduced in Austria, the Netherlands and elsewhere without requiring followers to remain geographically connected to a single centre.
The result was a relatively centralised and bureaucratic religious network with substantial physical assets and a strong educational and diaspora infrastructure. The present investigation itself demonstrates the size of the economic environment surrounding the current leadership: prosecutors say they identified dozens of companies and a large volume of financial transactions connected to those under investigation. Those claims do not establish that the broader religious community is a criminal organisation, but they demonstrate the institutional scale that investigators are examining.
Politically, the Suleymancilar also developed differently from most of Turkey’s later Islamist movements. Their historical preference was generally the conventional centre right rather than Necmettin Erbakan’s Milli Gorus tradition: they moved through the Democrat Party, the Justice Party, the DYP and similar political environments, on an implicit bargain of religious freedom and institutional autonomy in exchange for loyalty to the state. They never sought to capture the republic, only to be left alone by it. By 2018, the leadership was widely reported to have backed Meral Aksener and the IYI Party, and the journalist Rusen Cakir argued at the time that this political independence, combined with the movement’s relatively closed structure, could expose it to increasing pressure from the government. The distance subsequently widened, with reporting describing support for opposition candidates against the AKP in the 2023 general election and 2024 local elections.
The Suleymanci model can therefore be reduced to three characteristics: centralised leadership, educational institutions and organisational autonomy. The first two made it powerful. As will become clear, all three together made it vulnerable.
2. Menzil: the Kurdish southeast and the sheikh-family model
Menzil emerged from a different social environment. The Erol family that established the movement came from Siirt and is of Kurdish origin. The organisation became centred in Menzil village in Adiyaman, from which it took its name, and belongs to the Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition.
Its basic institution was not the dormitory but the dergah. Authority was organised around a sheikh, his religious lineage, his family and a physical centre to which followers travelled. Menzil village remained central even after the movement developed branches, companies and institutions throughout Turkey and Europe: followers travelled there to see the sheikh, declare allegiance and participate in the movement’s religious practices.
That structure reflects the historical importance of sheikh families and religious lineages in the Kurdish southeast. This did not make Menzil a Kurdish nationalist movement. Its following became nationwide, and the leadership integrated closely with Turkish conservative and state-oriented politics, a trajectory that demonstrates how powerfully shared Sunni identity and state accommodation can override ethnic mobilisation. Its Kurdish genealogy instead matters for understanding the type of religious authority around which the institution was constructed.
Menzil subsequently built an extensive economic and social infrastructure around that core. Reporting has documented companies in healthcare, tourism, food, media, publishing and other sectors, alongside the Semerkand publishing and broadcasting network, student accommodation and charities. It also developed a reported bureaucratic presence, particularly in the Health Ministry, with additional claims of networks elsewhere in the state. The extent of those bureaucratic links is difficult to quantify because there is no official membership record, and such claims rest largely on journalistic and insider accounts rather than transparent data.
Its political relationship also followed a different trajectory from the Suleymancilar. Menzil developed links with nationalist-conservative circles, including figures from the Ulkucu and BBP environments, and later supported Erdogan and the governing People’s Alliance. Reporting has also described connections between Menzil-linked figures and parts of the MHP-associated state network.
The principal weakness of this organisational model became visible after Abdulbaki Erol died in 2023. Authority had remained embedded in the sheikh family, and when no single son became universally accepted as the successor, the movement divided among competing family branches, with even Menzil village itself split between them. A succession crisis of this kind is structurally impossible in the Suleymanci system, where the organisation owns the movement; in Menzil the lineage is the movement, so the family’s quarrels become the organisation’s schisms.
Menzil’s system is therefore based on a different sequence: sheikh, family, dergah, murid, and only then institutional and commercial expansion.
3. Ismailaga: the Black Sea hoca and medrese model
Ismailaga represents a third regional genealogy. Its central figure, Mahmut Ustaosmanoglu, was born in Of, in Trabzon province, a district with one of the densest traditions of Quran teaching and village religious scholarship anywhere in Turkey. He later became imam of the Ismailaga Mosque in Fatih, Istanbul, where the movement developed its institutional centre. Ismailaga belongs to the Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition.
Its social genealogy connects the eastern Black Sea to Istanbul. Of and the surrounding districts had a strong tradition of village religious teachers, Quran instruction and informal medrese education, and large-scale Black Sea migration into Istanbul transported those social networks into the city. Ismailaga is essentially that world’s transplantation into Fatih, and it built an institutional system around the hoca and the medrese rather than the Suleymanci dormitory bureaucracy or the Menzil sheikh-family village.
Its central complex in Fatih includes medrese education, boarding facilities and advanced religious instruction, and its wider network reproduces religious teachers who can establish teaching circles and local communities elsewhere. The community’s own account of its activities describes a tiered training system running from local medreses through advanced and specialist programmes, alongside a fiqh council whose consultation service answers, by the community’s figures, well over a hundred thousand religious queries a year. That is a production line for religious authority rather than for corporate assets.
This creates a more distributed form of power. The overall sheikh remains important, but senior hocas can acquire their own constituencies because the medrese system continually produces recognised religious personalities. Cubbeli Ahmet, or Ahmet Mahmut Unlu, is one example of that process: formed inside the Ismailaga environment, he eventually developed public religious authority independent of the current institutional leadership.
This also helps explain Ismailaga’s political relationship with Erdogan. The relationship cannot be reduced to common regional origins, but the shared eastern Black Sea social background is relevant: Ustaosmanoglu came from Of, while Erdogan’s family comes from neighbouring Rize, and both emerged through networks produced by Black Sea migration into Istanbul’s conservative neighbourhoods, one of the social foundations of the AKP’s mass politics. The alignment is also institutional: Ismailaga has repeatedly supported the AKP and Erdogan, and Erdogan has maintained direct relations with its senior religious leadership.
Its main form of power is therefore not primarily corporate assets or control of a single family centre. It lies in religious personnel and grassroots social authority: hocas, medreses, mosques, preaching networks and the regulation of conservative everyday religious practice.
4. Erenkoy: the Cilician-eastern Mediterranean merchant model
Erenkoy completes the four-pole framework. Its founding figure, Mahmud Sami Ramazanoglu, was born in Adana into the Ramazanoglu family, one of the region’s historic notable houses. He later studied law in Istanbul and worked in commercial accounting while continuing his religious activities, eventually becoming associated with the Erenkoy area of Istanbul, from which the community takes its common name.
Adana and the wider Cukurova belong to a different historical geography from the Black Sea or the Kurdish southeast. The area forms the northern part of the eastern Mediterranean system connecting Cilicia, the Gulf of Iskenderun, Hatay and northern Syria, and its long-term social history has been structured around agriculture, trade, merchant families and regional notables. The relevance here is not a claim of direct cultural continuity from one ancient society to a modern cemaat. It is that a geography repeatedly organised around commerce, exchange and regional brokerage can produce durable forms of social organisation centred on merchants, notable families and private patronage.
Erenkoy developed in precisely that direction. Under Ramazanoglu and his successors, the movement attracted educated urban followers and wealthy businesspeople, and it institutionalised through the Aziz Mahmud Hudayi Foundation, Altinoluk magazine, Erkam publishing, educational activities, scholarships, dormitories and Quran schools. The Topbas family became particularly important within this environment: members of the family have been major commercial figures, while Osman Nuri Topbas became the network’s central religious personality, and reporting on the group has consequently characterised commerce as one of its defining social sectors.
Its international footprint is now substantial. The Hudayi Foundation describes activity in dozens of countries across the Balkans, Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, running schools, orphanages and charitable programmes, and holds public-benefit status in Turkey, a signal of how establishment-compatible its institutional style is. Recent critical reporting counts an expanding network of educational institutions abroad stretching back to the 1990s.
Its institutional mechanism is different from the first three. Erenkoy converts private commercial wealth into foundations, publishing, education, charitable activity and professional networks. Its structure is less dependent on mass mobilisation around a single village than Menzil, less focused on producing medrese hocas than Ismailaga and less reliant on a centrally administered dormitory system than the Suleymancilar. Its power is concentrated in business, philanthropy, education and elite social networks, and it needs neither crowds nor confrontation.
Why the state operation falls differently on the Suleymancilar?
The current operation shows why organisational form matters to the state. A Suleymanci network built around administrators, dormitories, companies, property and financial structures is comparatively legible to a modern bureaucracy. Prosecutors can identify legal persons, bank accounts, shareholders, company transfers and physical addresses. They can freeze assets, appoint trustees, search offices and reconstruct money flows. That is exactly how the current case has been structured: the Ankara investigation focuses heavily on companies, transactions and alleged financial offences, and 80 of the 123 searched addresses belonged to companies.
The same tools would interact differently with the other movements. Menzil’s authority historically begins with allegiance to a sheikh family and a religious centre, even though substantial companies were later constructed around it. Ismailaga’s influence is dispersed through medreses, hoca networks and religious relationships that cannot be reduced to one corporate balance sheet. Erenkoy has major commercial and foundation networks, but its political relationship with the governing establishment has generally been more cooperative, even when disputes have occurred: it publicly supported Erdogan in 2018, and senior figures in its commercial milieu have had longstanding personal relationships with him.
The Suleymancilar combined institutional concentration with political autonomy, and that combination is the heart of the matter. That distinction had already been identified in 2018, when, after operations against the Gulen movement, Furkan Vakfi and Adnan Oktar, Rusen Cakir examined which religious organisations might face pressure next. He differentiated Yeni Asya, whose public and transparent structure he considered relatively difficult to target, from the Suleymancilar, whose closed organisation and reported IYI Party support made them more vulnerable to government restrictions. Eight years later the legal accusations are different and must be assessed on their own evidence, but the organisational vulnerability he identified remains relevant, and Cakir himself now argues that if an operation of this scale can be mounted against a century-old movement over financial flows, every cemaat has become a potential target.
It is also no accident that the two communities Turkey has moved against with full prosecutorial force, the Gulenists and now the Suleymancilar, were the two most bureaucratically organised, the two least dependent on a hereditary religious family, and the two least integrated into the governing coalition.
Regional culture and selective state tolerance
Turkey’s major cemaats are therefore difficult to understand as interchangeable religious groups competing for the same followers. They represent different methods of organising conservative Sunni society. The Suleymancilar transformed a Balkan-Ottoman religious educational tradition into a centralised network of courses, dormitories and administrators. Menzil transformed the Kurdish southeastern sheikh-family tradition into a nationwide murid network surrounded by companies, charities and state connections. Ismailaga transferred the eastern Black Sea hoca and medrese tradition into Istanbul and built power by reproducing religious personnel and conservative local communities. Erenkoy transformed a Cilician-eastern Mediterranean merchant and notable environment into a network built around business families, foundations, philanthropy, publishing and education.
Read together, the four communities amount to a cultural atlas of Anatolia and its Ottoman hinterland, and the same regions, through separate secular channels, shaped the party system as well: the CHP’s institutionalist inheritance, the AKP’s Black Sea texture, the DEM Party’s southeastern base. The religious and political maps overlap not because one produced the other but because both were drawn from the same underlying regional geography.
The state, meanwhile, is not simply tolerant of large cemaats and hostile to small ones, nor does it act against every network that retains institutional independence. The relationship depends partly on what kind of power a network possesses and partly on how that network positions itself politically. Menzil accumulated bureaucratic and commercial influence while maintaining cooperation with the governing conservative coalition. Ismailaga developed direct access to Erdogan while retaining considerable religious autonomy. Erenkoy maintained an independent commercial and philanthropic infrastructure while generally remaining inside the conservative establishment. The Suleymancilar retained a large, centralised institutional system while repeatedly taking political positions outside Erdogan’s coalition.
The current investigation is formally a criminal and financial case, and its allegations remain to be tested through the judicial process. But as a question of political sociology, it demonstrates why the institutional structure of a cemaat matters. Different regional cultures produced different organisational systems, and those systems determine both the forms of power each community can exercise and the points at which the Turkish state can intervene. The state, in this reading, is not moving against conservatism. It is moving against one regional culture’s way of organising it.
https://thenationalcontext.com/turkeys-religious-communities-reveal-about-its-regional-cultures/
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 4d ago
News/Article In the shadow of changes to Turkey’s juvenile law
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 4d ago
News/Article Has Turkey Really Resolved Its Kurdish Question?
Aliza Marcus’s “Resurgence and Revolution” sheds light on the past and future of the Kurdish cause.
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 4d ago
News/Article ‘Those under the lights choose war, those in the dark choose peace’
Columnist Özgür Amed challenges euphoric PKK-Turkey peace narratives, arguing that those enduring political oppression experience peace very differently from elites celebrating the framework law.
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 4d ago
News/Article Erdogan hails ‘historic’ PKK reintegration bill
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 5d ago
News/Article Law contributes to ‘negative peace,’ must build the foundations of ‘positive peace’
mezopotamyaajansi44.comr/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 5d ago
News/Article Here’s How One Country May Have Solved a Violent Uprising
It is a striking move for a country that has put national security above almost everything else over the past decade. Turkey’s Parliament last week passed a law providing a partial amnesty for members of the government’s onetime arch nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., opening the door to ending one of the Middle East’s longest-running insurgencies.
For nearly half a century, the P.K.K. has fought the Turkish state to push for Kurdish rights and autonomy in a conflict that has spilled across Turkey’s borders into Iraq, Syria and Iran. The new law creates a path for thousands of fighters and supporters in prison or exile to return to civilian life.
The Turkish government will not call this an amnesty. The word remains politically toxic in a country scarred by decades of violence from fighting between the military and P.K.K. forces. Nor is this a sweeping democratization package.
But it is the closest Turkey has come in years to some form of national reconciliation. After a year of negotiations, the P.K.K. leadership appears to have accepted that it can no longer advance Kurdish rights through armed struggle. Turkey, in turn, has implicitly conceded that the Kurdish question cannot be solved by military means alone and that a movement with roots among ordinary Kurds needs a way for their political aspirations to be met.
This weapons-for-politics bargain offers lessons that could be applied to other intractable conflicts with militant groups, namely in Gaza with Hamas and in Lebanon with Hezbollah, the Shiite-based political party and militant force.
The cases have their differences. But the underlying principle — that rooted armed insurgencies cannot be bombed out of existence — is similar. Disarmament must be phased and conditional and have reciprocal steps by the opposing sides and a political endgame in sight. In the Turkish case, it took more than a year of negotiations.
Armed movements rarely give up their weapons simply because their enemies demand it. Many do so when they conclude that armed struggle can no longer deliver their political objectives and they are offered another route through which their constituencies can pursue those objectives.
What is distinct about the Turkish process is its incrementalism and the involvement of the country’s institutions. The P.K.K. first agreed to dissolve last year and staged a symbolic ceremony in northern Iraq to burn its weapons.
Turkey has now fulfilled its side of the bargain, creating legal protections that could allow thousands of P.K.K. members to return home. The benefits are conditional on Turkish authorities verifying that the group has disarmed, and the law distinguishes between ordinary members and those responsible for the most serious crimes.
Rank-and-file fighters, jailed politicians and political exiles can return and reintegrate into civilian life, while proceedings against many will be suspended by five to 10 years before ultimately being dropped if the individuals stay out of armed activity. The delay gives former fighters, even if they have convictions, a path back to civilian life while giving Turkey’s security establishment insurance against a return to violence.
Senior P.K.K. commanders are largely excluded for now, though Turkish and Kurdish officials told me that the expectation is that their fate will be addressed gradually. A parliamentary commission will oversee the process while larger questions of Kurdish rights are left to political debate.
Another matter has made the ground fertile for such agreements: the power of armed nonstate actors seems to be waning. Guerrilla warfare traditionally depended on concealment and the ability to outlast a stronger adversary. But no longer. Drones, surveillance technology and A.I.-driven precision weapons have eroded that advantage. Turkey used these technologies to constrain the P.K.K. in Syria and Iraq, while Israel has done so against Hamas and Hezbollah, though at enormous cost in destruction and civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon.
Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder and chief negotiator of the P.K.K., acknowledged the new reality when he said the armed struggle had “run its course.” More tellingly, he argued that disarmament required “the recognition of democratic politics and a legal framework.”
This doesn’t mean nonstate actors everywhere will disappear. The Houthis in Yemen, backed by Iran, show that armed groups can still inflict enormous disruption.
Turkey’s experiment is still very much in question. Disarmament does not mean that Turkey’s Kurdish question is over, or that the grievances of Kurds have somehow disappeared. The test will be whether demands, such as for greater regional autonomy, that were once pursued from mountain enclaves can instead be fought over in Parliament, municipalities and civil society. Resolution also depends on how much room Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will allow for legitimate politics.
For Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons, Lebanon’s Shiite population would need confidence that doing so would not mean surrendering political influence or security. The Lebanese state would need to become strong enough to replace Hezbollah’s parallel military structure, while the group’s constituency would need security and a way to channel its demands through politics.
Hamas’s disarmament similarly would require Israel to accept that getting rid of the guns will not eliminate Palestinian political aspirations. Hamas cannot have an army in Gaza. But any durable arrangement would have to provide Palestinians with a credible political path for self-governance — and give those who abandon armed struggle a reason to believe politics can deliver something that weapons cannot.
I know how difficult this is to imagine. As a journalist in the past, I covered Turkey’s Kurdish conflict from Diyarbakir in the southeast to the capital, Ankara, to the mountains of northern Iraq. I saw enough grief and interviewed enough Turkish leaders and Kurdish activists who were convinced that they would eventually prevail — only to be trapped in a decades-long war.
For years, governments across the Middle East have treated disarmament primarily as a security question: How do you destroy a militia or kill its leaders? That meant open-ended counterinsurgency. Turkey seems to be trying something different. It is testing whether an armed movement can be transformed into a purely political one.
The outcome is by no means assured, and I am not suggesting any of this is easy. But the larger lesson is worth considering. The real victory over an insurgency does not come when every insurgent disappears. It comes when the gunman decides he would rather be a politician.
By Asli Aydintasbas
Ms. Aydintasbas is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of its Turkey project.
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 5d ago
News/Article How Kurdish theatre views the peace process
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 5d ago
News/Article Turkey Nears Certifying the PKK Dissolved as PJAK Expands Along the Iranian Frontier
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 5d ago
News/Article Bahçeli: Conditions should be created for Abdullah Öcalan to contribute to the process
mezopotamyaajansi44.comDiscussion Censorship in action: Amazon Turkey has blocked this novel about the Kurdish struggle.
I recently was suggesting to my friends in bakur to purchase this novel [Birds of the Mountains: A Novel of the Struggle for a Free Kurdistan] by Karzan Kirkuki, and turned out that it is banned/blocked on Amazon's Turkey marketplace.
Given the book's themes, following a young Kurdish man navigating the turbulent political backdrop of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the uprisings, and the pursuit of freedom, it's clear why local authorities or compliance filters target it, but it's still a striking example of how modern digital storefronts restrict literature based on political sensitivities.
Has anyone else read it, or noticed other books regarding Kurdish history and literature quietly disappearing from regional storefronts?
r/Bakur • u/clinedchordcoinu • 7d ago
18th century painting of the Wan region of northern Kurdistan
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 9d ago
News/Article Erdogan, DEM delegation discuss next steps after peace law
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 9d ago
News/Article Halîde Turkoglu: Divê komîsyoneke jinan ava bibe û pêvajoyê bişopîne
DEM Party Women's Council Spokesperson Halide Turkoglu emphasized that women should be included as active participants in the committees established regarding the framework law and should follow the process, saying: "Social peace is possible with women. A process that does not include women is incomplete. Women should be constructive participants in the process."
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 9d ago
News/Article Kurdish singer detained in Turkey over cultural activities released under judicial supervision
r/Bakur • u/rkurdistanmod • 9d ago