The PKK Launches an Insurgency in Southeastern Turkey
A Marxist-Leninist Kurdish movement takes up arms, opening a conflict still unresolved four decades later
Quick facts
- PKK founded
- 1970s (sources differ: 1974 vs. late 1970s), by Abdullah Ocalan
- Armed insurgency begins
- August 1984
- First attacks
- Eruh and Semdinli, southeastern Turkey
- Deaths since 2015 alone
- At least 6,000 (CSIS estimate)
What happened
Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, as a Marxist-Leninist organization originally seeking an independent Kurdish state carved from southeastern Turkey and neighboring Kurdish-inhabited regions, in the 1970s. The group first engaged in armed action in 1984, launching attacks on Turkish military positions in the southeastern towns of Eruh and Semdinli that August, and the Turkish military responded with a counteroffensive that October. The conflict has continued in phases for four decades since, at a human cost the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates at more than 6,000 deaths since 2015 alone, including PKK fighters, Turkish security personnel, and civilians, even as the movement's own stated goals shifted over time from full independence toward autonomy and civil rights for Turkey's Kurdish population within its existing borders.
Why it matters
The PKK insurgency is the longest-running internal conflict of the Turkish republic's history, one that has shaped Turkish military policy, southeastern Anatolia's development, and Turkey's relations with Iraq, Syria, and its own Kurdish citizens, who make up a substantial share of the country's population. It stands as an open question mark on the otherwise centralizing, homogenizing nation-building project that Ataturk's republic pursued from its founding in 1923.
How we know
The PKK's founding, its 1984 shift to armed insurgency, and the Turkish military's response are documented in the University of Maryland's START consortium database of terrorist organizations, cross-referenced with the Center for Strategic and International Studies' ongoing tracking of the conflict's casualty figures.
Sources
- START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism), University of Maryland. Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Narrative · Reputable sourcestart.umd.edu · The domain "start.umd.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Examining Extremism: Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) · General sourcecsis.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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