Ankara’s onslaught against the opposition continued with the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu on March 18, in addition to over a hundred individuals. The events followed a day after Istanbul University revoked Imamoğlu’s bachelor’s degree, making him constitutionally ineligible to run in the 2028 presidential election. This is part of an older and broader campaign by Turkish authorities targeting the two main opposition parties, the CHP and the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party). Accusations range from corruption, especially in the case of elected mayors from the two parties, to “collaboration with terrorist organizations”. The term traditionally referred to the PKK, but now it is also associated with any political party representing the Kurdish minority or collaborating with such a party.
In the 2024 local election, the main opposition party, the CHP, grabbed significant victories to the detriment of the regime, including in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other major cities, humiliating even the candidates nominated by the government and approved by president Erdoğan. And Erdoğan is not someone who lets such things slide. Let us recall that in the 2019 local election, Erdoğan personally requested and obtained a rerun of the election in Istanbul, but the ballot was again won by Imamoğlu.
Imamoğlu's arrest sparked street protests, and opposition representatives criticized the use of the judiciary for political purposes and the government's anti-democratic blunders. Turkish Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunç stated that this cannot not be a political investigation since the judiciary is independent. Tunç's problem is that such investigations, whereby opposition politicians are removed from public office with the help of the judiciary, have been recorded in Turkey for years.
In 2015, when the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Selahattin Demirtaş, said on the sidelines of a rally that the Kurds would not support Erdoğan becoming a dictator, the Turkish judicial system took action. Demirtaş remains in prison, although there are several decisions of higher courts and the European Court of Human Rights demanding his release.
Demirtaş's HDP supported Imamoğlu in the 2024 Istanbul local election, helping him get re-elected. As a result, the charges against him now include cooperation with a terrorist organization.
The Kurds want peace, Ankara responds with bombings
On February 27, 2025, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (in Kurdish, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê – PKK), publicly called for the demilitarization and dissolution of the Party, which Ankara and the international community consider a terrorist organization. Öcalan was not allowed to make the appeal in person, via video link from prison on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara, where he has been imprisoned since 1999. Öcalan is serving a life sentence for his role in leading the PKK's terrorist campaign for 15 years. Instead, Turkish authorities allowed a delegation from the current pro-Kurdish party, DEM Party, to visit him to deliver his message. It was then read at a press conference of the party's leaders, with a prison photo of the delegation and Öcalan in the background.
Abdullah Öcalan was part of the group that founded the PKK in 1978 and led the terrorist organization until his capture in 1999, engaging it in a war against Turkey for the independence of Kurdistan in 1984. He held several command positions throughout that conflict, most of them in Syria, but also in Iraq, that is, in predominantly Kurdish areas, although most of the terrorist attacks were staged on Turkish territory. The war lasted until almost the end of the last century and, according to official statistics, caused over 40,000 victims. Adding to that is a huge number of extrajudicial crimes committed by both sides, with the complicity of Turkish authorities. In November 1998, Öcalan drew up a seven-point peace plan which, among other things, called for an end to the Turkish army’s attacks on Kurdish villages and demanded guarantees of recognition of the existence of the Kurdish culture and language, as well as a form of autonomy within a democratic Turkey. None of these demands were ever fulfilled, and Öcalan’s appeal of February 27, 2025 refers to them again.
On March 1, the PKK responded to Öcalan’s appeal with a ceasefire declaration. The following month, Iraq was supposed to host a congress of the organization, where a resolution was to be voted as a formal response to the leader’s appeal. But the Turkish army continued to attack PKK positions in northern Iraq, just two days after the organization’s response. Two weeks later, on March 15, a veteran PKK commander, Cemil Bayik, announced that it was impossible to organize the congress because it would expose the entire leadership to Turkish aircraft and drone attacks.
Two days later, on March 17, an airstrike killed 9 members of the same Kurdish family in the legendary town of Kobane, in northern Syria, where, in 2015, Kurdish militias backed by the United States, managed to win a major battle against the Islamic State. It was actually the first major defeat sustained by the jihadists. Following the airstrike in Kobane, the Kurds managed to advance further inland and, with the support of the international coalition, ended up crushing the Islamic State in Syria.
The commander of the Kurdish forces in the battle of Kobane was Mazlum Abdi, who later took the nickname “Kobane” and was promoted to commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an organization dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia. Kobane condemned the attack of March 17, 2025 as one against humanity and called on the new Damascus authorities to take measures to ensure that such incidents never happen again.
Nevertheless, “General Mazlum”, as Donald Trump himself referred to him in 2019, was not always a Syrian Kurdish army man. As he himself recognized, he was active within the PKK prior to 2015, and, according to some Turkish sources, he became a member of the terrorist organization as early as 1990. As head of the SDF, Mazlum Abdi always insisted that this force and the YPG are in no way connected to the PKK. Turkey, however, considers YPG to be the Syrian branch of the PKK. Therefore, they insist that Abdullah Öcalan's call for demilitarization and dissolution also applies to the YPG.
On February 28, the day after the PKK leader's announcement, Mazlum Kobane said that “it has nothing to do with us in Syria”, meaning that it does not address the YPG-SDF either. That’s where regional complications begin to unravel, calling into question both Ankara's peace process with the PKK and Turkey's relations with the new administration in Damascus, after Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow. Located at the epicenter of these developments, Turkey apparently finds itself at turning point in its history, being forced to reconcile its own ambitions with a number of political errors of judgement.
The anti-democratic missteps of the Erdoğan regime further complicate Ankara’s relations with national minorities
The Erdoğan-AKP regime defies the legal framework and the final rulings of courts of law whenever they do not reflect the president’s imperatives, regardless of whether they are Turkish or international tribunals. The cases of Osman Kavala and Selahattin Demirtaş are particularly resounding in this regard, although there are other relevant examples to be mentioned. All of them obtained victories at the European Court of Human Rights to the detriment of the Turkish state, and Turkey chose not to implement the said rulings. This primarily affects Ankara's credibility as a participant in international politics and we may very well witness a similar situation in the case of Ekrem Imamoğlu. It is therefore no wonder that Turkey's accession to the European Union is now a pipe dream, whereas in turn, the EU has adopted a rather transactional approach towards relations with Ankara. The relationship remains, however, important for European security, especially in the wake of the US administration’s obvious U-turn on this issue, but that’s as far as it goes.
The deterioration of Turkish democracy is not encouraging any hopes of settling the historical issue of minorities in this country in general, and of the Kurdish minority in particular. The resolution of this issue is directly connected not only to the democratic future of Turkey, which still refuses to recognize the tens of millions of people who are not Turks or Sunni Muslims, which is what any inclusive democracy should do. The very strength of Ankara's external posture depends on the recognition and inclusion of Kurds in democratic processes, especially in relations with Iraq and Syria, where Kurdish communities carry significant weight.
In northern Iraq, Baghdad authorities were forced to recognize this minority and even its autonomy within the Kurdish Autonomous Region, part of the Iraqi federation. But the presence of the PKK in bases in the mountainous north prompted Turkey’s military intervention. Since 1996, Ankara has taken advantage of the weakness Iraq’s weakness following the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime and developed a network of military bases, checkpoints and secured roads along a strip of the Qandil Mountains. The same scenario is unfolding in northern Syria today. Amid the weakened position of Syria following the civil war, SDF-YPG forces have taken control of the predominantly Kurdish region in the north, east of the Euphrates. Turkey has responded by advancing west of the Euphrates into a strip of Syrian territory. With the help of its local allies, it managed to occupy that strip and consolidate its presence through another network of military bases. According to some sources, Ankara would even like to expand its presence to other locations.
Judging by its extremely threatening military presence against the Syrian Kurds, Turkey has repeatedly threatened it will not tolerate a Kurdish autonomous zone in Syria, similar to the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Iraq. Ankara has always insisted that the SDF-YPG is an extension of the PKK and, as such, must lay down its arms and unconditionally submit to the new Syrian authorities. As we have seen, the Kurdish military leader of the SDF-YPG, Mazlum Abdi Kobane, as well as other individuals with political influence at the top of the Kurdish authority in northeastern Syria, have snubbed such a scenario. In contrast, shortly after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, SDF-YPG leaders repeatedly expressed their willingness to integrate the Kurdish form of self-government into the new Syrian state, provided that Damascus recognized this minority and its local institutional hierarchies.
Tensions were thus expected to escalate surrounding these issues. The new Syrian leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, seemed caught between the hammer of Ankara and the anvil of the Kurdish resistance. It is against this general backdrop that the March 10 announcement of an agreement signed by “General Mazlum” made headlines. In the detailed wording on the website of the SANA Syrian news agency, the agreement stipulates that the SDF forces will be “integrated into the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic, emphasizing the unity of Syrian territory”. The wording, together with that of Article 4 of the agreement, does not explicitly exclude the preservation of the current administrative structures in the northeast of the country, such as they were created by the Kurdish authority during the civil war. They might see their powers curtailed within the state administration, but not discarded altogether. Moreover, Article 2 in the said agreement contains one provision that could be seen as extremely dangerous in Ankara: “the recognition of the Kurdish community as an integral part of the Syrian state, with the Syrian state guaranteeing the right to citizenship and all constitutional rights [for the Kurds]”.
The word “recognition” is extremely dangerous from Turkey’s point of view, because it indicates the very step it has refused to take towards ethnic minorities throughout its entire republican history, for more than a hundred years: recognizing the existence of ethnic identities other than the official Turkish one. The terms of the agreement must be implemented by the end of this year, and this has allowed Ankara to refrain from uncontrolled reactions. President Erdoğan, Foreign Minister Fidan and other senior Turkish officials have contented themselves with conveying the generic message of support for the unity and stability of Syria. But I think the abovementioned details of the agreement are sending shivers down the spine of the Turkish capital. A stable Syria that recognizes the existence of Kurds would make Turkey the only country where this huge minority community exists, but whose laws do not recognize it.
This reality was the source Turkey’s ever-tensioned relationship with the millions of minority ethnic citizens, a historical problem that remains unsolved. The armed conflict with the PKK or with various Kurdish organizations that preceded the PKK is also rooted in this historical dispute. The precariousness and fragility of Turkish democracy is also the result of this reality. Today, Turkey is moving further away from the fundamental criteria that define democracies. The recent arrest of hundreds of opposition politicians, Kurdish and Turkish alike, foreshadows a Turkey that has very little in common with any democratic model.
The aggressiveness of Turkey’s approach to the Kurdish issue, at home but also in Syria and Iraq, undermines its own credibility as an international actor, and the peace process initiated by Abdullah Öcalan will be doomed to failure, like all those that preceded it. And that famous slogan that guided the policy of founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, “peace at home, peace in the world”, has stopped making sense to most people living in Turkey today.
