Turkey's Islamist government is stepping up pressure on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to disarm, in keeping with a March 10 accord they signed with Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa.

“The PKK structure known as the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] and the Syrian administration had an action plan. It will lay down its weapons and submit,” Omer Celik, the spokesperson for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, said on Wednesday. Celik was referring to the Kurdistan Workers Party, the Kurdish group that recently announced it was ending its armed campaign against Turkey and disbanding itself in response to its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan’s orders to do so. Ocalan’s call is linked to the government’s ongoing effort to bring the insurgency, which has lasted more than four decades, to a definitive end in exchange for as-yet unarticulated concessions to the Kurds. 

A parliamentary commission in charge of overseeing the effort convened on Wednesday for the first time. The commission is strictly limited to developing a legal framework that will both oversee the freeing of thousands of prisoners convicted on terror charges over their alleged connections to the PKK, and work out amnesty and related arrangements for thousands of PKK guerrillas scattered across the mountains of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. Constitutional changes that would enshrine broader rights for the Kurds are not part of the commission’s work, leaving open the question of whether any will be granted at all.

Celik was echoing claims from Ankara that Ocalan’s call applies to all of the PKK’s affiliates, including the SDF, whose core component, the People’s Protection Units, was established by the PKK.