Is Turkey on brink of more violence?
Increasingly militarized conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK has brought Turkey to the brink of a new spiral of violence.
The spectacular success of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey’s June 7 general elections gave rise to fresh hopes for peace and the beginning of a new democratization process, but unrest is not giving up without a fight.
The HDP garnered 13.1% of the national vote and won 80 seats in parliament, with about 1.1 million non-Kurdish citizens voting for it. Although HDP Co-chair Selahattin Demirtas issued a call July 14 for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to lay down its arms, reports from the field suggest that it will not be all that easy for the HDP to free itself from perceptions of being a mere instrument of the Kurdish movement’s military wing instead of an independent, civilian element of the movement.
Armed clashes erupted at the end of June between the Turkish army and PKK militants in the Daglica region, on the Turkey-Iraq border. On June 30, for the first time in two years, Turkish warplanes bombed PKK positions in the area. The Uludere region was already considered a hot zone, according to the state, because of cross-border smuggling, or as the local people see it, because of traditional border trading.
Ankara has been tense since Tell Abyad was taken from Islamic State fighters by the military wing of the US-supported Kurdish Democratic Union Party and by the possibility of the Kurds advancing westward to establish links with Afrin.
