Why Darwin, not Marx, explains the PKK

By chance, in the early 1980s, I encountered in the office of a Lebanese Marxist organisation a small group of fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They told us they were training in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley to “fight Turkish imperialism”, and that they were also training members of an organisation then known as the “Armenian Secret Army”. That latter “army” did not survive the era. The PKK, by contrast, evolved into a strategic actor in regional politics – most notably in Syria.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, the Syrian government controls approximately 68 per cent of the country’s territory. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) hold 28 per cent, the National Guard forces in Suweyda 3 per cent, while Israel occupies 0.1 per cent.

The SDF with its YPG core is one of several organisational offshoots of the PKK, which was founded in Turkey in 1978 by a group of Marxist students who began sporadic clashes with the authorities in the country’s south-east. By the following year, and with the participation of other factions, this developed into an open insurgency that lasted from 1984 to 1999.

Hafiz Assad early on grasped the potential uses of the PKK and sought to instrumentalise it within his regional political agenda. The first group of PKK fighters arrived in Lebanon in 1979, barely a year after the party’s founding. Coordination later shifted into Syria itself, when Assad permitted the party to hold two congresses, in 1981 and 1984, and opened a training camp known as the “Mahsum Korkmaz Academy” in the Beqaa Valley in 1986. Syrian territory was also used to launch attacks into Turkey, leading to a dangerous escalation that threatened Turkish military invasion of Syria. At that point, Hafiz Assad expelled the party’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, from Syria in 1998, and he was subsequently arrested later that year in a multi-state intelligence operation in Nairobi.

The outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 offered the PKK a new opening: the formation of an alliance to prevent the revolution from spreading to Kurdish areas, and standing in the face of Turkish influence. Regime forces withdrew, allowing the PKK’s Syrian branch, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), to expand and take control of border areas with Turkey, while hundreds of PKK fighters entered Syria in coordination with the Iraqi government.

Despite being designated a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, the PKK found new patrons among these supposed ideological adversaries. In 2014, they formed a coalition to fight Islamic State, the hybrid offspring of which was the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF.)

The functions assigned to the PKK have shifted repeatedly: from opposing Turkey, to preventing the Syrian uprising from reaching Kurdish regions, to fighting Islamic State. With the defeat of the jihadist organisation in Iraq and Syria, a new role was required. The Americans opted to continue to back the SDF, despite the PKK’s natural inclination towards the Russian–Iranian alliance that supported Assad. The PKK was, in fact, a link in the strategic corridor linking Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, which stood at odds with American strategy.  

The blows dealt to Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, followed by the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, appeared to offer the SDF a way out of its torn loyalties between the Iran–Russia axis and the United States. Yet the emergence of a new Syrian government marked by pronounced pragmatic openness towards Washington, the European Union, and the Gulf Arab states - and the launch of talks with Israel - soon generated a fresh dilemma. The US now found itself acting as a patron to both Damascus and the SDF, enabling Washington to broker the 10 March 2024 agreement, albeit one still beset by serious difficulties.

Half of the world’s Kurds live in Turkey, most of them historically concentrated in the Zagros and Taurus mountains, in conditions that, according to a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, expose them to food insecurity that undermines livelihoods, access to services and markets, and integration into central economies.

From a social, urban and environmental perspective, the armed conflict launched by the PKK in 1984 can be understood as a vast process of displacement, uprooting this population from the mountains and pushing it into the cities. Around one million Kurds were forced into overcrowded shantytowns in cities such as Diyarbakir and Van, as well as into western Turkish cities and later Europe. This displacement, together with the deaths of more than 40,000 people, fed into subsequent waves of internal and regional political change and renewed violence in 2004, 2011 and 2015.

The defeat of the “Young Turks” government in the First World War, accompanied by Western occupations across the Arab world, was the pivotal event that shaped the modern Middle East. The foundations of the Turkish Republic were later built on a radical rupture with the Islamic legacy – in script, culture, politics and the representation of non-Turkish identities – and on an extreme emulation of the Western model. The banning of Islamist parties, as a Kurdish writer recently observed, deprived Kurds of a political lung through which they could breathe. Within this context, the PKK became a conduit for Kurdish nationalism by embracing a form of secularism more radical than Atatürk’s own.

The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002 represented a revival of the idea of a broad Islamic nation encompassing multiple ethnicities. This was seized upon by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), regarded as the PKK’s political face in Turkey. It sponsored negotiations leading to the PKK’s decision to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. The reforms and political opening allowed the PKK’s allies to secure 80 seats in the Turkish parliament – a reminder that the first parliament established in 1920 included 70 Kurdish deputies. One of their leaders was Yusuf Ziya Bey, who fiercely opposed the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 for fear that it would unravel the decentralised compact embedded in the Islamic idea.

Through the many roles it has assumed over time, the PKK has shifted from its original project of building a communist Kurdistan to championing the language of “democracy for peoples” in both Turkey and Syria, while also showing a willingness to fight under the command of its former ideological enemy, the US, which had itself played a role in the arrest of Abdullah Öcalan. The PKK has thus demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for adaptation; its political trajectory owes more to Darwin than to Marx.