SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
PKK must disarm 'immediately': Turkey defence ministry source
Istanbul, March 6 (AFP) Mar 06, 2025
Outlawed Kurdish group PKK and all groups allied with it must disarm "immediately", a Turkish defence ministry source said on Thursday, apparently referring to Kurdish forces in Syria.

"The PKK and all groups affiliated with it must end all terrorist activities, dissolve and immediately and unconditionally lay down their weapons," the source said.

Last week, PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan urged his militant group to dissolve and his fighters to lay down their arms in a historic call.

The 75-year-old founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party has been jailed since 1999.

The PKK, which has engaged in a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state in which tens of thousands of people have died, declared a ceasefire on Saturday and said it would comply with Ocalan's call.

But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has backed the peace move, was quick to warn that if the promises weren't kept, the military would continue its anti-PKK operations.

"We always keep our iron fist ready in case the hand we extend is left hanging in the air or bitten," he said on Saturday.

Since January 1, 478 "terrorists" have been "neutralised" in anti-PKK military operations, the source said, of which 195 were in Iraq and 283 in Syria.


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
Space: the new frontier for smartphones at trade show
SpaceX aims for Thursday Starship test flight after last-minute scrub
Musk survives Royal Society expulsion; EU tasked to detail public funding to SpaceX, Tesla

24/7 Energy News Coverage
Trump to welcome crypto elite at White House
A catalytic two-step: Transforming industrial CO2 into a renewable fuel
Chip-based system for terahertz waves could enable more efficient, sensitive electronics

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
Macron proposes French nuclear extension, Ukraine troop deployment
China says to hike defence spending by 7.2% this year
Europe will struggle to plug Ukraine's US military aid gap: analysts

24/7 News Coverage
Chinese Remote Sensing Constellation Expands for Global Market
BAE Systems selected to develop NOAA's next-generation space weather satellite
ESA Red Cross alliance advances crisis response



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.