https://nationalinterest.org/feature/its-time-acknowledge-pkks-evolution-42482
It's Time to Acknowledge the PKK's Evolution
On January 11, 2019, President Donald Trump began the drawdown of U.S. forces from Syria, making good on a promise tweeted shortly before Christmas. Trump’s tweets caused a firestorm within the Pentagon and foreign policy circles. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned after failing to convince Trump to change his mind. The abandonment of Syrian Kurdish groups fighting alongside U.S. Special Forces was, for Mattis, the last straw. National Security Advisor John Bolton has tried to temper abandonment of the Kurds, although it remains unclear to what degree he will be successful.
Many supporters of Trump’s decision argued the United States owes little to the Kurds. There are two major streams of criticism toward the U.S. alliance with the Syrian Kurds. The first is realist and argues that Turkey is more important to U.S. interests. That may have been true historically, but ignores that the only reason the U.S. allied with the Kurds in the first place was because, under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, they proved more willing to confront the Islamic State than Turkey. Other critics of the U.S. alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say that it is simply cover for the People’s Protection Units (YPG), itself a component of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a U.S.-designated terrorist group which has led an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984. No amount of intellectual somersaults or diplomatic doublespeak can hide that fact, though the State Department tries. What the YPG have accomplished militarily is impressive, as have been the accomplishments of Kurdish civilian organizations inside Syria.
(Keeping the differences, alliances and seperations between the YPG and PKK can be difficult)
At issue is whether the PKK should be judged by its actions of thirty-five-years-ago, or whether it is possible to accept that organizations and governments evolve.
The PKK was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan, a young ethnic Kurd in Turkey with a group of like-minded Kurdish Marxists in a Diyarbakir tea house. Over the next years, it moved to consolidate control over the Kurdish cause, often targeting and assassinating members of competing leftist and Kurdish groups and political parties. What had begun as a local terror campaign touched a geopolitical nerve. By the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Öcalan attracted Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s support. Syria, which played host to a number of other terrorist and revolutionary organizations. The Syria-supported Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) trained the PKK in its Lebanese camps.
Over the decades, Öcalan’s rhetoric has moderated and the PKK goals have changed. No longer does the group talk about Turkey’s partition; rather, its talks about decentralization and “democratic confederalism.” Much of Öcalan’s political philosophy might be gobbledygook, but it is not the Soviet-tinged Marxism feared during the Cold War. And, while an Öcalan personality cult may still remain, it is really little different than the Atatürk cult in Turkey or Barzani cult in Iraqi Kurdistan.
PKK tactics have changed: There remains low-level military insurgency, but gone are the days when the PKK targets Turkish civilians (alas, the reverse is not true with regard to Turkish forces and Kurdish civilians, as the residents of Cizre, Nusaybin, and Sur can attest). Certainly, breakaway factions of the PKK such as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) have claimed attacks, but such factionalism is common when former terrorists come in from the cold. That was the case with the “Real IRA” which emerged after the IRA entered into a peace process in Northern Ireland.
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Over the course of the last decade and a half the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has transformed its ideological orientation in accord with the changing outlook of its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. It has discarded its erstwhile Marxist-Leninist ideology for the anarchist-inspired thought of the American political theorist Murray Bookchin.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14683849.2018.1480370
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