In the early hours of Dec. 27, armed clashes broke out in Cizre, a big town in Şırnak province in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. Three people were killed, while many homes were hit by bullets. One of the clashing parties was the YDHG, or the Patriotic Democratic Youth Movement, which is known as the youth organization of the armed and outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The other party was Huda-Par, a party established by Islamist Kurds. Both sides claimed that the other side attacked first.
This was yet another episode in the ongoing tension between the secular-nationalists and Islamists within Turkey’s Kurdish population, which constitutes roughly 15% of the 76-million-strong nation. The first group is represented by the PKK, which has led a guerrilla war against the Turkish state, at times with terrorist tactics, since 1984. The PKK also has political organizations and is implicitly represented by political parties, the latest of them being the People's Democracy Party (HDP). Its ideology has strong leftist, even Marxist tones, which is not readily welcome by the more Islamist or traditional segments of the Kurdish population.
That is why the majority of Turkey’s Islamist Kurds have stayed away from the PKK and its political affiliates. In the past decade, many of them have voted for the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP). (That is why AKP spokesmen often claim to represent more Kurds than those represented by Kurdish nationalists.) The more hard-core Kurdish Islamists have set up their own parties, though, and the latest of them is Huda-Par, or “Free Cause Party,” which was founded in 2012.
The origins of Huda-Par go back to the 1990s, to the notorious “Kurdish Hezbollah” (no relation to the Hezbollah in Lebanon), which was a terrorist group that fought the PKK with brutal methods of assassination, kidnapping and torture. It was then widely believed in the southeast that the Kurdish Hezbollah was tolerated, supported or even created by the Turkish state as a rival to the PKK. In its own ideology, however, the Kurdish Hezbollah was merely defending the Islamic territory of Kurdistan against the domination by the PKK’s godless communists.
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