It is a striking move for a country that has put national security above almost everything else over the past decade. Türkiye’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 PKK, opening the door to ending one of the Middle East’s longest-running insurgencies.
For nearly half a century, the PKK has fought the Turkish state to push for Kurdish rights and autonomy in a conflict that has spilled across Türkiye’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 PKK forces. Nor is this a sweeping democratisation package.
But it is the closest Türkiye has come in years to some form of national reconciliation. After a year of negotiations, the PKK leadership appears to have accepted that it can no longer advance Kurdish rights through armed struggle. Türkiye, 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 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 PKK first agreed to dissolve last year and staged a symbolic ceremony in northern Iraq to burn its weapons.
Türkiye has now fulfilled its side of the bargain, creating legal protections that could allow thousands of PKK 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 Türkiye’s security establishment insurance against a return to violence.
Senior PKK 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 non-state 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 AI-driven precision weapons have eroded that advantage. Türkiye used these technologies to constrain the PKK 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 PKK, 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 Ansar Allah in Yemen, backed by Iran, shows that armed groups can still inflict enormous disruption.
Türkiye’s experiment is still very much in question. Disarmament does not mean that Türkiye’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 Türkiye 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 Türkiye’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. Türkiye 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. The New York Times
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