“We voluntarily destroy our weapons … as a step of goodwill and determination,” said senior Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Bese Hozat, speaking in front of a gathering of the group’s fighters.The footage, filmed last Friday in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah, then shows the fighters – about 30 of them – placing their weapons inside a cauldron, where they were set alight.
The ceremony may have been symbolic, but it capped what might be one of the most consequential periods in Turkiye’s recent political history. It wraps up a carefully planned sequence of gestures and messages, and shows that both sides are not just coordinating symbolically, but are also politically aligned in their intent to move from armed conflict to political dialogue.
The choreography of the build-up to the ceremony unfolded with remarkable precision, revealing both political coordination and calculated restraint. Such an alignment would have been impossible without mutual recognition between the PKK and Turkiye of the importance of what was about to happen, as well as the consequences of any failure.
On July 7, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan received his country’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party delegation for the second time in four months. A smiling group photo from the meeting was widely circulated, signalling both the normalisation of dialogue and the symbolic approval of the process at the highest level.
Two days later, on July 9, Abdullah Ocalan – the imprisoned PKK leader and …
