the PKK-led insurgency as the twenty-ninth Kurdish rebellion in Turkey’s Republican history. He probably referred to the records of the General Staff, which was be the primary actor in charge of Kurdish policies and suppressing rebellions. However, there had been four major Kurdish armed uprisings properly deserving of the appellation rebellion, in terms of their magnitude. The first three, in 1925, 1930, and 1937, were all led by either religious figures or tribal chieftains. Their suppression by the “Young Republic” took less than a year in each case.3 The Mt. Ararat revolt nominally continued a couple of years but de facto, it took from June 1930 to September 1930 for the Turkish military to quell the revolt. If the Dersim incident is regarded as an uprising, the third and most recent of this grouping, it was over in less than six months and was nonetheless the longest until the rebellion initiated by the PKK in 1984.
War for Decades
The PKK-led Kurdish insurgency not only has become the longest ever in Turkey but also has been one of the longest struggles in the world in terms of asymmetric warfare. No armed struggle other than that of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia which lasted from 1964 to 2017 has been sustained longer than the struggle of the PKK.
This fourth and the longest, and geographically the broadest and the most inclusive Kurdish uprising cross-cuts linguistic and sectarian divisions of the Kurdish society and provides a sui generis case regarding the history of Kurdish rebellions in Turkey. It, equally, is a unique ideological phenomenon. There have been many rebellions recorded in Kurdish history, each bearing ethnic demands of Kurds to varying degrees. With the PKK-led movement, the Kurdish ethnicity entered into a period of supra-tribal resistance. It has moved toward becoming a national entity, transcending the societal and geographic boundaries of tribal structures.4 In the words of Robert Olson, “If the Kurdish nationalist movement was the sore thumb of the Turkish republic after its creation in 1923, it became the Achilles heel of the Turkish state in the 1980s and 1990s.”5
The fourth and last Kurdish insurgency in Turkey has political and social ramifications extending far beyond Kurdish and Turkish territories because of the unique and peculiar geopolitical characteristics of Turkey and the Middle East.
Its toll in terms of human casualty and devastation of livelihood, as well as damage to the economy, has been enormous. The figures vary according to different sources, but from the beginning of the PKK’s armed struggle in 1984, in three decades, between 30,000 and 40,000 people are estimated to have been killed. The highest casualty figures belong to 1984–1999 period. The number of people who lost their lives in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict is among the highest on the global scale for such conflicts. The Turkish Ministry of Defense and military and police sources claimed that “between 1984 and 1999, 5,828 Turkish security officials, 5,390 civilians and 19,786 PKK were killed.”6 In a report published in 2009, the casualty figures between 1984 and 2009 were given as 41,828. Citing data provided by the Turkish General Staff, the Gendarmerie High Command, and the General Directorate of Security, during the 26 years of violence, the figure for the dead and wounded climbed to 63,443. In the same report, the estimate of the economic cost of the conflict was given as $300 billion.7 The Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden estimated over 30,000 Kurdish fatalities, with the destruction of more than 2,000 villages inhabited by the Kurds in Turkey’s southeast. It provides the number of casualties between 1989 and 2017 as 31,178. Its well-presented data indicate that the highest casualty level was reached during the 1990s. Especially, after 1993, the year of the first PKK cease-fire, the casualty figures suddenly climbed.8 Similarly, the upward movement of the casualty figures between 2011 and 2013, and even higher numbers after the year 2015, manifested the correlation between the collapse of the peace processes and the resumption of the war.
The failure of two successive peace processes and with them the collapse of cease-fire, first in 2011 and then in 2015, revived the high casualty figures revealing the cataclysmic nature of the conflict as the prospects for a political settlement faded away. Since the breakdown of a two-and-a-half year cease-fire in July 2015, the PKK conflict in Turkey has entered into one of its deadliest chapters in more than three decades, devastating communities in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast and striking the heart of the country’s largest metropolitan centers. The International Crisis Group has worked to track the rising cost of violence using open-source data, including reports from Turkish-language media, local Kurdish rights groups, and the Turkish military. According to the Group’s casualty tally, updated on October 22, 2019, 4,686 people had been killed in clashes between the security forces and the PKK since July 20, 2015. Of this figure, more than half are PKK militants (2,578), 22.4 percent of whom are female. Around a quarter (1,215) consist of state security force soldiers, including police officers and village guards (ethnically Kurdish paramilitaries who are armed and paid by the Turkish state). There have been 490 civilians confirmed dead, and the remaining 223 are “individuals of unknown affiliation.”9
The militant-to-state security force member fatality ratio provides some indication of the Turkish campaign’s impact. Since fighting shifted back into rural areas in July 2016 (after a deadly urban phase between December 2015 and June 2016), the Turkish military has been on the offensive. In the first year, 1.65 PKK militants were killed for each soldier, police officer or village guard; this figure rose to 2.22 in the second year and then to 3.22 in the third. In the last year, from July 2018 to July 2019, 3.36 PKK militants were killed for each state security force member. . . .
The last year of escalation (2018–2019 saw the highest number of fatalities from Turkish air and land operations against the PKK in northern Iraq since July 2015. Crisis Group could confirm 101 fatalities linked to such operations in that area in 2019, of whom 90 were PKK militants and 11 were Turkish soldiers. According to open-source data collected between May and September 2019, the Turkish army has conducted at least 76 cross-border air operations, most of them targeting PKK hideouts and ammunition depots in and around the Qandil mountains where the PKK’s “headquarters” are located. . . .
With the stated goal of “ending the PKK,” the Turkish military launched air and ground offensives against the militants in northern Iraq (dubbed Operation Claw) on 27 May 2019. In a first since 2008, Turkish ground forces penetrated around 20km deep into Iraqi territory to clear out militants, cut off logistical routes and destroy ammunition depots. The Turkish military also created new security outposts. . . .
Besides the higher-ranking PKK militant fatalities, Crisis Group data on PKK militants killed in Turkey and northern Iraq between July 2018 and July 2019 (a total of 361) shows that around 8.5 per cent (31) were from western Iran, around twice the number in the same period of the previous year. . . . This data suggests that the PKK is compensating for the manpower shortage in its insurgency against Turkey by bringing in more cadres from Iran. It also means that the pool of recruits the PKK can draw on in its insurgency against Turkey goes beyond Turkey’s borders.10
Almost 1,000 deaths were confirmed during the July 2011 to December 2012 escalation in the aftermath of the failure of the Oslo Process.
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