Turkey’s overtures to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with last week’s meeting in Moscow between the Turkish and Syrian defense ministers, continue to resonate. Unsurprisingly, one of the most realistic assessments came from the one group that understands Turkish thinking best: the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The armed organization has been fighting the Turkish state on numerous fronts for more than 38 years, 15 of which were centered in and around Syria. In an interview that aired Monday on the pro-PKK news channel Medya News, top PKK commander Bese Hozat noted that the shift in Turkey’s Syria policy was “not tactical.” To the contrary, it is being driven by Turkey’s desire to “extinguish the Rojava revolution, to extinguish the Autonomous Administration in North East Syria, to make it disappear,” Hozat declared. Rojava is the Kurdish name for Kurdish-majority northeast Syria where a US-supported and Kurdish-led administration with close links to the PKK has been governing for the past decade after Assad redeployed his forces there to fight Turkish-backed Sunni rebels.

Hozat is right. Turkey’s security establishment remains immutably opposed to the consolidation of any form of Kurdish autonomy in Syria that would mirror Kurdish gains in neighboring Iraq — especially, as Ankara sees things, one led by the PKK and its local affiliate. No matter that under the stewardship of Mazlum Kobane, the commander in chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces and a former PKK militant, Rojava had begun to establish its own distinct identity, forging an alliance with the region’s Arabs and insisting on peaceful relations with Turkey. PKK cadres had begun to recede into the background, at least until intra-Syrian Kurdish squabbles, Turkish scheming and clumsy US diplomacy put the kibosh on that process. Turkey has rejected all of Kobane’s overtures, adding him to its list of most wanted terrorists and placing a bounty on his head.

The notion that Turkey’s current efforts to woo Assad are rooted in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hopes to persuade Turkish voters that an estimated four million Syrian refugees will be sent packing once the two leaders shake hands ignores Turkish security establishment's determination, as Hozat described, to put an end to the Syrian Kurds’ experiment with self-rule.