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Syria-Lebanon-Iran

The Turkey-Israel Layer of the PKK Peace Process

2026-07-30

[NationalContext] The Turkey-PKK peace process contains a strategic layer that most analysis leaves out. Between late 2024 and mid-2026, the external power competing with Turkey over the future of the Kurdish armed groups changed. Since the 1980s, Iran had been the main outside state shaping the environment in which the PKK operated, and Iranian policy kept the conflict contained while making a final settlement difficult to reach.

After October 7, and above all after the fall of the Assad government in December 2024 and the US-Israeli war on Iran in 2026, Israel took over that position. Israel is working to recruit Kurdish armed groups as long-term partners against Iran and, in Ankara’s assessment, eventually against Turkey itself. This change explains the timing of the peace process, the speed with which Turkey has pursued it since the war, Ankara’s exclusive reliance on the Ocalan channel, and Ocalan’s own cooperation, which rests on his long-standing opposition to Israel’s regional role. The sections below set out the evidence for each of these claims.

WHY THE PROCESS RESTARTED WHEN IT DID
The regional change that made the settlement possible was October 7 and the Israeli push to reshape the region that followed it. At the strategic level, Ankara and Ocalan reached the same reading of Israeli planning: the objective was regional hegemony, to be achieved by first dismantling Iran and its regional extensions and then moving against Turkey. This is the layer that explains a restart which appeared to come from nowhere and surprised most observers, and it also explains why Turkey, which held the stronger position on the ground, accepted negotiations with Ocalan as the political representative of the movement.

Turkey was fortunate in its adversary. Ankara had been deeply sceptical of Ocalan for decades, but its own strategic thinking was changing, and as it changed it moved closer to his reading of how the region was being reshaped. The two sides converged on opposition to Israeli hegemony, and that convergence opened the gate to a settlement. Much of the surprise that greeted Bahceli’s handshake with DEM deputies, and the steps that followed it, comes from analysis that missed this. The evidence set out below supports the reading, the consequences reach across the region, and the convergence is likely to deepen for as long as the shared adversary remains.

The second factor determined the speed. Elements of the PKK leadership in Qandil, and figures within the SDF, were building ties with Israel, and Ankara concluded that the situation was moving beyond its control. The purpose of the process was therefore wider than ending an insurgency. Turkey moved to internalise the Kurdish question within a Turkey-centred regional system before Kurdish and Arab political forces could be incorporated into the Israeli-led project to reshape the region, first for use against Iran and eventually against Turkey itself.

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Posted by:badanov

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