In a move described as a new turning point in the path of the peace process aimed at ending the four -decade -decades armed workers’ party against Turkey, the party made a symbolic ceremony to throw weapons and burn it near the Sulaymaniyah province in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Thirty members of the party participated in the ceremony, 15 women and 15 men, who burned their weapons in a symbolic weather attended by more than a hundred observers from Türkiye, including officials from the Democratic and Equality Party and journalists.
The photos that were taken after the ceremony showed fighters in camouflaged clothes lined up in one queue to throw their long rifles in a large amount of fire, while a group of unknown attendees watched the ceremonies from white tents erected around the place.
In a statement carried by the party’s ANF agency, the PKK described the ceremony as “a good -intention and commitment to a practical success of the peace path,” and stated in the statement: “We are destroying our weapons of our free will.”
Last May, the party announced the end of its armed struggle against Türkiye after its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan ordered the dissolution of the party, and his weapon was removed as part of peace negotiations with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. These negotiations were crowned with the issuance of Ocalan, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment since 1999 in the Emerali prison off the coast of Istanbul, an order to dissolve the party in March. In a photo message published on Wednesday, Ocalan pledged to accelerate the steps of disarmament, and this was his first video footage in more than twenty years.
The ceremony was to be transferred directly through the media, but the coverage was canceled in respect of the killing of 12 Turkish soldiers this week in the Kurdistan region of Iraq as a result of their poisoning of methane while they were searching for the body of a colleague who was killed in a clash with the party in 2022.
Informed sources confirmed that the senior party officials, Mustafa Qara Sue, wore Hzat, was expected to participate in the ceremony, and the photos confirmed the presence of Hozat already. For its part, the Kurdish authorities in Iraq have tightened security measures in the vicinity of the place of the ceremony, as convincing elements of the Special Forces deployed on the roads leading to the site, and television footage showed.
Sulaymaniyah is under the control of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the major political parties in the Iraqi Kurdish region, which Ankara accuses of providing support to the PKK.
