Can PKK, Turkey’s Hezbollah reconcile?
Resurging violence between two old Kurdish adversaries in Turkey’s southeast, the PKK and the Islamist Hezbollah, has generated fears of renewed Kurdish fratricide in the region.
A long-standing lull in the bloody conflict between the Turkish Hezbollah, a Kurdish-dominated Islamist group, and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has long fought for Kurdish rights in Turkey, has been shattered amid the war between the Islamic State (IS) and Kurdish forces in neighboring Syria. The tensions, which had flared up over the past year, climaxed earlier this month in Diyarbakir, the largest city of Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, when four people close to the feuding sides were shot dead in broad daylight. The unrest sparked fears of renewed Kurdish fratricide in the region, but both sides called for peace and common sense as they have reaffirmed in interviews with Al-Monitor.
To get a better understanding of the unrest, it's worth recalling how the feud unfolded two decades ago in one of the darkest episodes in Turkey’s recent history.
Hezbollah — unrelated to its Lebanese namesake — is one of the main radical Islamist organizations in Turkey. Inspired by the Iranian Revolution, the group was founded in 1978 and got organized in the mainly Kurdish southeast, with its senior members receiving training in Iran, according to a published doctoral thesis by Mehmet Kurt, an academic at Bingol University.
Hezbollah earned itself a gruesome nationwide reputation in the early 2000s when police discovered its so-called grave houses across Turkey, in which dozens of people were killed and buried after torture. The victims included Islamists who disavowed Hezbollah’s ideology and journalists.
