After more than 40 years of armed struggle, with some intermittent periods of cease-fire, the PKK announced the surprising decision not only to lay down its arms but to disband.

If the objective conditions of systemic repression of the Kurdish population have not changed in Turkiye, why suddenly change strategy by abandoning the armed struggle and also decide to dissolve the organization? Is there any kind of political offer from Turkiye on the other side of the balance to the martyrs who have given their lives for the organization? Would a possible release of Abdullah Ocalan from prison be all they get in return, or is there something else?

What they get is not in Turkiye, but in Syria.

The sudden collapse of the Syrian army and the seizure of power in Damascus by Al Jolani, leader of Al Qaeda rebranded as HTS, left an unprecedented scenario for all military actors present on the ground in Syria. The whole country was occupied by forces subordinate to the US (HTS, SDF, SNA, FSA, ISIS, Turkiye, and "Israel") after the expulsion of the groups allied to the Palestinians and Lebanese. The situation provided the possibility of exploration of new realities long thought of in the West, including the complete fragmentation of the country and its partition. Given that all political and military subjects in Syria were dependent on the US, those best placed to achieve novel objectives would be those closest to Washington, and events were to be precipitated.

Of course "Israel", in the midst of the global morass produced by the fall of Syria, devastated with impunity all the military capabilities of the former Syrian army and began to occupy large areas. It will continue to expand its invasion to try to annex territories, strategic sites and natural resources, but also to try to fragment Syrian society, which is what all colonialism has sought to do with the natives in its invasions. This use of minorities by the Israeli colonial power has started with the Syrian Druze as it did eight decades ago with the Palestinian Druze.

The next to understand the new scenario were the Kurds of NE Syria. For them, the time to demand from the Damascus government an institutional recognition of the territory they conquered in the war against ISIS thanks to the military support received from the US has come to an end. It should be recalled that the “generous aid” from the US pursued its own goal of occupying Syria and its border crossings in order to weaken the Syrian state and block the geographical connections of the regional resistance groups.

After the fall of Syria, Kurdish leaders saw that the new regime of Al-Jolani was the weakest actor, despite Western flattery, and that it was now enough to negotiate with the US the recognition of a status for NE Syria, the self-denominated DAANES. The oil and cereals of that region, patrimony of all Syrians, were exported for their exclusive benefit in recent years, collaborating with the US and its criminal sanctions in the collective punishment of the rest of the Syrian people. Now those resources, oil and food, could be the privative economic bases of a future semi-independent territory, like Iraqi Kurdistan. To achieve this goal, the Kurds would have to offer something to the US, Turkiye and "Israel" instead of an irrelevant Al-Jolani, whose piece of Syria will be dependent on Turkiye.

Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader, quickly made a first announcement of the end of the armed struggle on January 3, reiterated on February 27, adding the future dissolution of the party. On March 1, the PKK Executive Council ratified its full support for its leader's proposal.

This controlled blowing up of the PKK, originally engineered by Kurdish leaders in Turkiye and Syria and adopted by Ocalan, caught other representatives of the organization and its supporters by surprise.

PKK de facto leader Cemil Bayik in an interview in January showed more confusion than conviction with the proposal. He stated that Turkiye is weaker than ever and added that Erdogan was not making proposals to negotiate. He forcefully defended the continuation of the armed struggle, “The Turkish state attacks us every day with all kinds of weapons. How are we going to stop under these circumstances? Of course, our struggle continues”.

Bayik evidenced that the conditions for a change of strategy in the PKK did not exist. On the regional situation, he added that “a new Syria is being built based on the protection of Israel, which represents international capital”, in an analysis of classic anti-imperialist roots that Bayik still maintains to some extent. Most sympathizers and supporters of the Kurdish organization were also left in bewilderment without understanding the background of Ocalan's offer. However, the quasi-religious hyper-leadership embodied by “Rêber Apo” has led to the decision being accepted without any internal criticism so far.

The Kurds will get their desired political status for NE Syria.

Turkiye has always claimed that it would never accept an autonomous NE Syria ruled by Kurds linked to the PKK. What is achieved by this maneuver is to appease Erdogan, and instead of negotiating on the continuity of autonomous Kurdish territory in Syria, what Turkiye is being offered is nothing less than the demise of the PKK itself, the armed struggle and the revolutionary manifesto. Erdogan will be able to sell it as a great victory and will be able to give his approval to the liberation of Abdullah Ocalan and the proto-state of NE Syria under certain conditions.

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"Israel" also received an offer from the Kurds that the Zionist regime will not refuse. Recently, several accounts close to the Kurdish government in NE Syria announced on the same day two closely related events.

On the one hand, the sudden creation in southern Syria of “military councils” identical to those that the Kurdish-led SDF forces were setting up in the NE of the country during the war against ISIS. Their logos and rhetoric were identical to those of the Syrian Kurdish movement. The leader of Sweida's “military council” acknowledged that the creation of the group was talked about with the US.

The second announcement of these accounts from the Syrian Kurdish environment was a consequence of the first. If there are Druze military and civilian groups in southern Syria seeking to associate themselves with the NE Kurdish project, then it is logical to link them physically by creating a land corridor. The Israeli regime, which has long been working to separate the Syrian Druze from the rest of the country, has supported this operation by sending convoys of supplies decorated with Druze flags into these areas of southern Syria.

In reality, this land corridor from NE to S parallel to the Syrian border has been completed since the Israeli invasion of southern Syria a few days after the fall of the Assad government. In the middle of the path of that corridor is Al Tanf, an area of Syria occupied by the US where it gave training to extremist gangs that attacked the Syrian army periodically in recent years.

In the very near future, NE Syria, where the US is expanding its military bases, the US-occupied middle section of Al Tanf, and southern Syria, which is occupied by the Israeli regime, will be physically connected. Syrian oil from the NE will be able to reach "Israel" directly through this land corridor. Previously, it had to travel a long way to reach "Israel" when the oil was shipped from NE Syria to Iraqi Kurdistan, then to Turkiye and from Turkiye it was shipped from Ceyhan to Israeli ports.

The PKK, from the anti-imperialist struggle to the pact with the empire

This decision to abandon arms is the culmination of the PKK's ideological evolution over the years.

In its first decades, it was based on the confrontation with US imperialism and its subordinates for the right of self-determination of the peoples of the region liberated from colonialism, and focused its objective on an oppressive Turkiye against the Kurdish people, but without forgetting the neighboring oppressed non-Kurdish peoples. Hundreds of PKK guerrillas were thus trained in Palestinian camps in Lebanon, and even died together, Kurds and Palestinians, fighting against "Israel" in 1982. These theses are still more or less valid in the Taurus and Qandil mountains where the PKK has traditionally operated and are still perceived in the words of Cemil Bayik.

In the current doctrine, the diagnosis of colonialism and imperialism in the region has been intentionally suppressed and replaced by the diffuse idea that “in the Middle East we are suffering a third world war” in which all actors are equivalent. Iran is equivalent to Turkiye, the US is equivalent to Russia, Hamas is equivalent to "Israel", or Hezbollah is equivalent to ISIS, “they are all the same, they all seek the same thing in the region and we kurds are alone”. From this perverted logic, for the PKK it is licit to seek individualized solutions to the struggles of each actor by seeking the support of one or several of these powers, and therefore it is licit to associate with the US, because “it is one more actor” among all those present in this “third world war”. Under US protection, it has established a self-governed territory in the NE of the country, one that is shown internationally as a revolutionary bubble. In theory, it is governed by assembly communes, but in practice, the NE of Syria looks more like an autocracy led by SDF military commander Mazloum Abdi, who also makes political and economic decisions and even international representation of that territory.

This distortion and simplification that “all actors are equivalent in the third world war in the Middle East” manages to reassure their supporters, international leftist parties, and alternative media that omit uncomfortable questions about the alliances with the US, Europe, and "Israel".

However, for the Communist Party of Turkiye the diagnosis is clear: “The PKK is a non-Marxist nationalist organization. The PKK has merged with liberalism and its alliances with the US and Israel. This self-destruction of the PKK does not advance democracy for a Turkey where tyranny, extreme poverty and deep social inequality prevail”.

The PKK's decision to lay down its arms can be questioned by analyzing the regional context. Is it a time of understanding and agreement among the peoples of the Middle East because imperialism has disappeared from the region, or is it a time of maximum aggression of imperialism in the region?

The uprising of the ghetto by the Palestinians on October 7 and the support of their regional allies has unleashed the period of maximum colonial violence. The US and Israeli response has been to drop six Hiroshima bombs on Gaza, and expansive aggression throughout the region in an attempt to stabilize the Israeli colonial regime. At this crucial moment of regional liberation war, the PKK is seeking opportunistic and temporary gains through a transaction with the empire, which is obviously not a casual actor in a “confused world war” in the Middle East. The political agenda in Turkiye is relegated and will be explored by the Kurds from that territorial base in NE Syria in a future greater understanding with Iraqi Kurdistan.

Epilogue

One of the legacies of the PKK will be its interesting proposal of Democratic Confederalism for the Middle East/West Asia region.

One hundred years ago, the European powers imposed artificial borders and nation-states on the whole area through the Sykes-Picot, San Remo or Lausanne agreements, accompanied by the creation of the European settlers' colony in Palestine. These artificial walls created by France and the United Kingdom did not respect the right of the peoples to democratically establish a collective organization after the fall of the Ottoman power that ruled them. Democratic Confederalism proposes to seek this new dissolving organization of the current nation-states, creating a more fluid territory for people and human relations, similar to what historically was the region of Western Asia.

Obviously, such a project is impossible to approach as long as the current historical period of imperialist and colonial interference that precisely imposed the border cages, as well as the Israeli colony as the nucleus of the whole scheme of zonal oppression, is not overcome. Precisely, to try to achieve this objective of a democratic confederation of peoples in a post-colonial future is to become collectively involved in the regional struggle against imperialism and colonialism, not to turn away from it and compromise with the oppressor.

Freedom for one is not possible without freedom for all in the Middle East, and that is the opposite of agreeing and legitimizing with the current empire and tinkering of the Sykes Picot Accords for a territorial gain obtained by force with the military support of the US itself.