Half a year ago, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) spearheaded by Selahattin Demirtas, its young, charismatic leader, was the rising star in Turkish politics. The party, with its roots in the violent Kurdish political movement dominated by the armed and illegal Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), had recast itself as a left-liberal, inclusive peacenik movement and a bulwark against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism. As a result, it emerged from the June 7 general elections with some 13.1% of the vote, doubling its usual mandate. Since then, however, the HDP’s meteoric rise has been reversed by a meteoric fall.

In the Nov. 1 snap elections, the HDP vote declined to 10.8%, resulting in the party losing 21 of the 80 parliamentary seats it had won just five months earlier. More recently, prominent voices in the mainstream, secular-liberal media who had supported Demirtas, or at least seemed sympathetic to his cause, began to oppose him and his party. Many political commentators believe the HDP “squandered” the opportunity it had created earlier in the year and will never regain it.

There is a clear and simple reason for this: In the wake of the June elections, the sluggish, yet still effective “peace process” remained ongoing between the government and the PKK. In June, however, the process collapsed, and the three-decade-old armed conflict resumed, with PKK attacks on security forces and counterterrorism responses by the government. Soon thereafter, the PKK initiated a strategy of creating “autonomous” zones in certain Kurdish towns, leading to urban warfare between its forces and government troops. The result has been a mini civil war in which more than 150 Turkish soldiers and 180 PKK fighters have died. Civilians caught in the crossfire have suffered the worst, sustaining more than 260 casualties and 750 injured, according to the Human Rights Association.

Why did the peace process fail and Turkey descend into bloodshed? Naturally, the PKK blames the government, and the government blames the PKK. I have argued mutual​ responsibility in addition to the toxic effects of the Syrian civil war spilling into Turkey. The conflict is not a war between Turkey and “the Kurds” — as often incorrectly asserted in Western media — but between Turkey and the PKK. In fact, Iraqi Kurdistan and its traditionalist leader, Massoud Barzani, find themselves closer to Ankara in this conflict than to the Marxist and “arrogant” PKK.