Authorities have captured 147 suspects linked to the PKK terrorist group in nationwide operations, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Thursday.
Operation “Gürz-28” targeted PKK suspects in 30 Turkish cities, including Istanbul, Antalya and Diyarbakır, Yerlikaya said.
The suspects are charged with operating within a terrorist organization, providing funds to a terrorist organization and spreading terrorist propaganda on social media platforms, according to the minister.
The raids, conducted jointly by gendarmerie forces and anti-terrorist police, also seized unlicensed weapons, hunting rifles, narcotic drugs, organizational documents and other digital materials.
“We are rooting out the terrorist group that has ambushed and targeted Türkiye’s national unity for 40 years,” Yerlikaya said.
Turkish authorities have also targeted PKK hideouts in rural regions as part of Gürz operations.
Yerlikaya on Wednesday announced security forces had destroyed a total of 709 PKK hideouts so far in 2024 and seized explosives reserved for bomb attacks, mines, hand grenades, munitions, rocket launchers and other materials.
With no shelter in urban locations, the PKK takes advantage of mountainous territories in Türkiye’s southeast, where its members spend winter in remote caves.
Strikes on the terrorist group have only intensified after a PKK attack on the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) in Ankara that killed five and injured 22 people in October.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 to achieve a so-called Kurdish self-rule in southeastern regions and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the United States and the European Union. The YPG is its Syrian offshoot.
Its bloody terror campaign has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people in the country since then. Kurdish residents in southeastern provinces suffered the brunt of PKK violence, losing children and loved ones to forced recruitment, their homes to bombing strikes and regional peace to the PKK’s brutality and harsh state measures to contain it.
PKK violence is now more focused on the mountains of northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)-administered region, where PKK militants have their headquarters in Qandil, which sits roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of the Turkish border in Irbil.
Türkiye has, over the past 25 years, operated several dozen military bases in northern Iraq in its war against the PKK and has been conducting airstrikes as part of “Claw” operations since 2022 to demolish terrorist lairs and prevent the formation of a terror corridor along its borders.
Until recently, Iraq has said the operations violate its sovereignty, but Ankara says it is protecting its borders where it intends to establish a 30-40 kilometer security corridor.
In August, the neighbors agreed to military cooperation, namely joint training and operation centers, against the terrorists, months after Baghdad declared the PKK a banned organization.
Türkiye, however, wants Iraq to recognize the PKK as a terrorist group fully.