In almost four decades of bloody conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Ankara has used various counter-strategies to prevent the PKK from achieving its political goals, ranging from repressive ones such as counter-terrorism and an iron-fist approach to accommodative ones such as population-centric counter-insurgency and conflict resolution, including what was called the “peace process” from 2013 to 2015. 

Today, Ankara appears to have turned to a more ambitious strategy of eliminating the PKK as an institution rather than preventing it from reaching its political goals, drawing on a domestic political climate that enables a no-holds-barred approach against the PKK and new military capabilities such as armed drones, smart munitions, T-129 attack helicopters, Bora tactical ballistic missile, counter-IED systems, 155 mm Storm howitzers, radars and day/night surveillance systems. The PKK, which took up arms in 1984, is considered a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.

The goal of the new strategy can be described as total eradication of the PKK and all its auxiliaries in Turkey, not only in the military sphere but also in the political, socio-cultural and economic fields. The strategy aims to change the narrative of “Turkey’s Kurdish problem” — the traditional description of the problem in popular Turkish discourse — to “the PKK problem of the Kurds in Turkey” — a new description that is widely discussed in Ankara nowadays. 

The most important leg of the new strategy is to break the PKK’s pressure over the Kurdish-dominated People's Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest force in Turkey’s parliament, and force the HDP to distance itself from the PKK and transform. As a result, the HDP has come under growing strains in recent months amid mounting accusations that it is recruiting militants for the PKK, helping the group financially and logistically and collaborating with the PKK’s urban militants.