From mountaintops to underground: PKK responds to Turkey’s drones
Serdar Yektas, spokesperson for the Kurdistan Workers Party's armed wing, told Al-Monitor that Turkey’s use of its home-manufactured drones has drastically changed the nature of the conflict between them.
Turkey signed a landmark security cooperation deal with Iraq on Aug. 16 — principally, as Ankara sees things, against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). A day earlier, the PKK marked the 40th anniversary of the launch of its armed campaign against the Turkish state.
Much has changed since the left-leaning group founded by Abdullah Ocalan, a university dropout from the southeastern province of Urfa known to his followers as “Apo,” carried out its first operation against a Turkish gendarmerie post in the southeastern province of Siirt.
The PKK originally set out to carve an independent Kurdish state from Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Today it advocates for greater political autonomy and cultural rights for the Kurds within Turkey’s borders. At the same time, the PKK and its sister branches in Syria advocate “democratic confederalism,” a form of radical decentralization that is meant to devolve power to grassroots-level micro administrative bodies, but the idea has yet to be seen in practice.
The capture of Ocalan in February 1999 by Turkish special forces in Nairobi in a sting operation aided by the CIA and Mossad dealt a big blow. Defections ensued as Ocalan, who is still being held in isolation on an island prison off the coast of Istanbul, called on his forces to end their fight and to withdraw from Turkey. Today the majority of PKK fighters are based in Iraqi Kurdistan, with an unknown number operating alongside the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria. Its military impact in Turkey is minimal.
On the diplomatic front, its efforts to secure legitimacy have not fared much better. The United States and the European Union continue to classify the group as a terrorist entity. Iraq has yet to use the label but in July declared that it had “banned” the organization together with three political parties alleged to be operating under its orders. While the practical impact of these moves remains to be seen, there is little doubt that pressure is growing on the PKK, particularly on the military front.
Turkey’s use of its own manufactured drones has drastically changed the nature of the conflict. with a rising number of PKK fighters dying in Turkish drone attacks. Gone are the days when PKK militants could stage raids on Turkish military posts and inflict substantial casualties. The group has been largely driven underground — literally — and the manpower cost of sustaining the conflict has sharply dropped for the Turkish military, which has succeeded in moving the battle outside of Turkey’s borders to Syria and Iraq, where Turkish forces routinely conduct large-scale operations.
Roj Girasun is a young Kurdish researcher and pollster and the co-founder of Rawest, an organization based in Diyarbakir that produces in-depth analyses of Kurdish society and politics. Girasun contends that rapid urbanization has led Turkey’s estimated 16 million Kurds to grow ever more integrated with Turkey and Turkish society. The urbanization is in part due to the forcible displacement of more than a million Kurdish villagers during the army’s scorched earth campaign in the 1990s.
“Their identities are becoming less homogenous and their demands for solutions within the confines of peaceful politics is rising,” Girasun told Al-Monitor. “The handicap for the PKK is that not only are the physical conditions for armed struggle growing more elusive, the social conditions that lent support to the armed struggle are being transformed as well.”
Yet, 40 years on, despite Turkey’s repeated claims that it is on the cusp of full victory, the PKK continues to survive and even thrive in some respects. The war against the Islamic State resulted in an unexpected and continuing military partnership with the Pentagon in Syria that has poisoned Washington’s ties with Ankara. Syrian Kurdish leaders with roots in the PKK govern over large swathes of northern Syria that are home to the country’s biggest oil fields. Some 900 US special forces stationed there to combat ISIS provide a security umbrella.
At the same time, the PKK has forged new tactical alliances, among them its cooperation with Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq. It has also developed and acquired new weapons, with Turkish officials confirming that the group has downed several Turkish drones. (The Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, a Turkish think tank, published a detailed analysis of the PKK’s combat capability in 2022.)
Some analysts contend that the PKK has gone from being a domestic problem to a geopolitical one for Turkey.
Above all, for as long as the reasons that led to the creation of the PKK exist, Turkey’s Kurdish issue — and the PKK — will not go away. “Armed groups can be defeated, can be marginalized, but this does not mean they are finished,” Girasun noted. Successive Turkish leaders have admitted as much.
However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first leader to sanction direct peace talks with the group and its leader, initially in 2009 and then again in 2013. Even his fiercest critics acknowledge that Erdogan displayed great courage and leadership, albeit short lived. The talks and a mutually observed cease-fire collapsed in 2015 with each side blaming the other.
In an exclusive interview conducted on Aug. 12 via Signal, Serdar Yektas, the spokesperson for the PKK’s armed wing known as the People’s Defense Forces (HPG), responded to Al-Monitor’s questions about the shifting battle field dynamics and the PKK’s ongoing “tunnel war.”
The HPG provided Al-Monitor with exclusive photographs of life inside the tunnels.
The following is the text of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Al-Monitor: The Turkish government says that the PKK has been severely weakened and pushed underground. How would you respond to that assessment?
Yektas: Since 2015, the Turkish state has been deploying all its might and resources against us, notably unmanned armed drones. These are instruments that were given to the Turkish state by NATO and other forces and not ones that Turkey devised on its own. It was argued by nation states that thanks to these instruments, national liberation movements, guerilla movements they were faced with, would be wiped out and would no longer exist. And it is true that from 2015 onwards we began suffering losses. We are not concealing this. And this gave great hope to the Turkish state. As you may recall, at the start of this year, Erdogan said, "We are going to completely eliminate the PKK."
With this turn of events, as guerrillas we started a debate. In northern Kurdistan [the majority-Kurdish regions in southeast Turkey] we do not have tunnel systems. We lack the means to rely on the tunnels to resist and fight. We therefore made a decision. We said until such time that we can develop strategies to resist the enemy, we will reduce the size of our forces in northern Kurdistan and not send in new groups. This was a tactical and temporary move because the more of our forces we kept in northern Kurdistan the heavier our losses would have been. Turkey would have been convinced of its own success. In parallel, in the Medya defense zone [referring to the mountains on the Iraqi side of the border where the bulk of PKK fighters are based] we bolstered our forces and developed new tactics and strategies, notably the tunnel system.
We began refining the design and details. How will it be ventilated, how will it be heated? Where will the water come from? How will it be accessed? How will daily life be? A lot of thought and effort went into these tunnels.
Today they are like any regular apartment. They have toilets, bathrooms, kitchens, pantries and living rooms. We built veritable apartments inside the mountains. We have generators that provide electricity. We have televisions, internet. I am sitting here talking to you with a TV in front of me and a space heater to my side. We have computers and sports equipment. We have large assembly rooms where we hold seminars. We cook with electric stoves and use gas oil as well. In wooded areas we even use timber to light fires within the tunnels.
Al-Monitor: Isn’t that dangerous?
Yektas: Some of the tunnels are very large and extend for kilometers. If you plan the entry points and the altitudes properly, the air circulates very well and stays clean.
For potable water we lay pipes to carry water from outside if there are natural sources -- streams, springs, etc. Where there is none, we store water. We use melted snow that we collect in the spring. We have large water storage tanks and chlorinate them to keep the water pure and clean.
Al-Monitor: How long is your longest tunnel?
Yektas: I can’t give you a specific length but as I said, we have tunnel complexes that extend for kilometers. We name the tunnels after fallen comrades.
Al-Monitor: It must get pretty claustrophobic. How do your forces cope psychologically with being underground?
Yektas: Our forces are not underground continuously. If this were so, how would we conduct our work? Think of it like this: When you don’t have work, you spend time at home. If there is work you can do from home, you do it from home. And the rest is conducted outside. Of course there is a difference between sleeping under a starry sky or inside a tunnel. When our comrades were fighting ISIS in urban areas in Syria and Iraq, be it in Kobani, [Sinjar] or Kirkuk, they missed the mountains. They had trouble sleeping.
Al-Monitor: If you are using the internet, it must be easy for the Turkish military to pinpoint your location?
Yektas: Let’s say Turkish forces determine our location using signals intelligence. The most they can do is to bomb us. That’s the reason we built these tunnels. They do bomb us but it does not affect us. You may not believe me: There are instances when we aren’t even aware that it’s happening until our comrades elsewhere tell us what is going on.
Al-Monitor: You say that, but the broad consensus is that the PKK is squarely on the defensive and no longer holds any kind of initiative against the Turkish military.
Yektas: Killing a lot of soldiers is not the key to solving the Kurdish problem and won’t secure freedom for the Kurdish people. It will just deepen the problem. Then why do we resort to military methods? It is because we have no other means at our disposal. One cannot organize or speak freely [in Turkey]. One cannot practice politics freely. The number of Kurdish politicians and others in prison speaks for itself. …
What we are trying to tell the Turkish state is: You cannot finish us through war, through attacks, through killing us. And let’s say they sharply reduce the power of the PKK or finish off the guerrillas as a whole; this is not going to end the Kurds’ struggle for their rights. You may say we are weakened. On the contrary, we are ideologically more cohesive, more focused and united in our resistance and our goals than ever. We are resisting one of NATO’s most powerful armies. We are developing our own technological tools. For example, we have downed 18 of the Turkish state’s armed drones even though they won’t admit it.
We have downed Bayraktar TB2s produced by Erdogan’s son-in-law and Anka and Aksungur drones produced by the Turkish state. We published all the photos. We can send them to you too. We have reached this level.
Al-Monitor: I am familiar with the reports. You have your own drones as well.
Yektas: That is true. We call them aerial vehicles.
Al-Monitor: Can you be more specific? Are they armed? How do they operate?
Yetkas: We cannot share too many technical details on that score. I can tell you this much: There are ones that can drop bombs. There are others that are laden with bombs and explode upon attaining their target.
Al-Monitor: Where do you get them? Turkey accuses Iran of providing them. Do you produce any of them yourselves?
Yektas: We do not share such information.
Al-Monitor: Turkey’s current strategy against you includes targeting mid-level cadres who would potentially rise to replace existing leaders, some of whom are in their 70s. Turkey wants to leave your force without any experienced leaders.
Yektas: This is true. If you want to destroy a movement, you concentrate on eliminating its leaders. In this vein, Turkey has increased the number of targeted assassinations of our commanders relying on intelligence from local sources. This is not new. In 1996, they tried to kill our leader Abdullah Ocalan by targeting his home in Damascus. He has been held in isolation since 1999. They believed that if he could not communicate with us the PKK would crumble and would make strategic mistakes. That did not happen. Their calculations failed in part because they confuse our thinking with their own, because they have a master-and-slave approach, because the Turkish state is run like that. But we are not like that. Young and old we intermingle, have our own thoughts and share our experiences and expertise. We join with our own free will.
Al-Monitor: My understanding is that recruitment, particularly from Turkey, has dropped sharply and that most are coming from Iran and to a lesser degree from Syria.
Yektas: If one is to believe Turkish propaganda, there are hundreds of our comrades being killed every day and there are zero new recruits. Imagine you have a basket full of apples and you are removing apples from it every day and not replacing them. But the basket is always full of apples. And as you well know, we don’t have kids. [He is referring to the PKK’s rules of strict celibacy]. How is it possible, then?
Al-Monitor: Where do most of your recruits come from?
Yetkas: Most of our forces are from northern Kurdistan.
Al-Monitor: What percentage?
Yektas: I can’t give you a precise figure.
Al-Monitor: Do they come directly from Turkey or from the diaspora?
Yektas: It really depends on the circumstances. For example, between 2013 and 2015 we had many more recruits from Turkey, particularly to take part in the war against Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Syria and in Iraq. More recently, after the mass protests in Iran [over the 2022 death due to police violence of Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini], many youths joined from Iran. Had they stayed, many would have been executed.
Al-Monitor: You are harshly criticized for recruiting children and even forcing them to join your ranks. We have reported on such cases in Al-Monitor.
Yektas: There are agreements that we signed pledging to not recruit minors and we try to remain faithful to them. We do not approve of child fighters. But we are faced with situations where there is a surge in demand to join our ranks. This is especially true when mass abuses take place. Children witness their parents being slain, being tortured, humiliated, degraded, their homes being raided and their privacy violated. They are filled with rage and come to us. Through its actions, it is the state itself that pushes us to go to the mountains, to take up arms against the state.
Getting back to the tunnel system, which is the object of this interview. … Let me give you some background. From 1992 onwards we began to move underground. Prior to then we used to shelter in tents and other makeshift structures that we could easily camouflage using leaves and other means. We needed to be mobile.
With the emergence of the Sikorsky helicopters we needed to shift to a different defensive system. As guerrillas we started to depend more on the underground.
Similar to the trenches we see being used in the Russia-Ukraine war, we began digging trenches that also protected us against the elements, particularly in areas where there was heavy snowfall. We are talking about Bakur [the majority-Kurdish areas of Turkey] and the mountains of Bakur. These evolved into several fully underground chambers that were connected to one another. When Turkish forces would attack us they were unable to detect these rooms because they were so well concealed.
They were large rooms that could accommodate up to 20 people. In the winter months we would carry out weapons and ideological training in them. In the spring months we would emerge. It was our winter accommodation, if you will.
Al-Monitor: How do you build the tunnels?
Yektas: If the soil was soft, we would dig these tunnels. But in certain areas there were natural caves that would extend for hundreds of meters. We would shelter there, much as people did in prehistoric times. However, starting in 1996 and 1997 we conducted a tactical and strategic reassessment. This was in the wake of the Zap operation. [He is referring to two separate incidents that took place in Iraqi Kurdistan in May and June 1997, respectively, when the PKK shot down two US-made helicopters carrying Turkish forces with what the Turkish General Staff said were Russian-made missiles. A total of 13 soldiers and officers died in the attacks.]
We decided to strengthen and develop the subterranean system, as it was proving very effective. However, we determined that the underground rooms were no longer sufficient and that we needed to develop a more complex and sophisticated system.
As a guerrilla force one is at a material disadvantage when fighting a conventional army of the state which is attacking you with all its might. One is forced to constantly devise new strategies and to take advantage of opportunities that arise, as they did during the first and second Persian Gulf wars and to consolidate one’s positions in newly liberated areas and to be able to defend them. In guerrilla warfare, you hide so the enemy cannot see you. And no matter how developed the enemy’s weapons are, no matter how numerous they are and no matter where they attack you from, be it land or air, if you conceal yourself well, there is nothing it can do. The fact that your forces are smaller in number ceases to matter.
The tunnel system emerged as such as a key factor in helping to level the playing field with the Turkish army. However, following [the capture of Ocalan in 1999], a period of calm ensued. We used that period of calm that lasted til around the end of 2004 to hone our fighting skills and tactics in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, notably to develop the tunnel warfare system.
At that time, the tunnels were only several meters deep. We would keep our Dochkas [Russian-made heavy machine guns] and our antiaircraft weapons in those tunnels. We would bring them out to attack the enemy using a rail system, then take them back in. The Turkish military was using F-16 fighter jets and Israeli and American-made armed drones against us. Bombs would rain on us. The tunnels allowed us to defend ourselves against those attacks.
In 2011, Iran had carried out large-scale aerial attacks on the Qandil mountains [targeting the bases of the PKK’s Iranian arm, PJAK], including Gele Jasusan, where the Iran and Iraq borders converge. Thanks to the tunnels our comrades had created there, Iran suffered significant losses despite deploying its elite forces.
Al-Monitor: Are there guerilla organizations that rely on similar methods?
Yektas: The Taliban, if you can call them a guerrilla organization, used the tunnel warfare strategy in the Tora Bora mountains against the United States and Russia. But because those mountains are very barren, the Taliban carried out its war by embedding itself among local civilians in the area. That is why so many civilians died in US attacks against them as US forces were often unable to separate fighters from civilians.
Al-Monitor: If the tunnel system is so effective why did you not develop one inside Turkey’s borders? There are very high mountains there too.
Yetkas: As I mentioned previously, up until 2004, things were largely quiet. There followed periods of fighting and calm. Then with the resumption of the peace process in 2012 and 2013, despite the Turkish state’s false claims that we were planning bomb attacks in the cities and preparing for war, I can tell you in all sincerity that war and attacks against Turkey were not on our agenda. To the contrary, in line with the peace process, we were preparing for withdrawing our forces; our comrades were preparing for an end to the hostilities. But we then realized that the Turkish state itself was insincere and the process collapsed in 2015.
Al-Monitor: One final question. The PKK has also been bitterly criticized for launching the so-called trench war inside cities, towns and neighborhoods across southeast Turkey in 2015 that led to wide-scale displacement, death and destruction. In hindsight, would you agree that it was a mistake to ignite the war inside urban areas?
Yektas: It was Kurdish youths who used their own initiative to launch these acts of resistance. The PKK was not directly involved up until Dec. 14, 2015, when the Turkish army launched its operation [in Cizre and Sirnak near the Iraqi border] that we decided to step in. But many of our forces were stuck in the mountains due to harsh weather conditions that cut off our access. Had we been present, our resistance would have been stronger than that of Hamas against the Israeli army.
Let me clarify one thing: By establishing these tunnels, our aim is not to destroy, to divide the Turkish state. We are a people. These lands are ours. We are the children of these lands. We were born here and grew up here. Be it in the Kurdish lands in Turkey or in the other parts, all we desire is to be able to live freely with our own identity, culture and language. That is what our struggle is for. We are resisting their efforts to destroy our culture, our identity, our language, to eliminate us in our entirety. In order to survive we are obliged to resort to these methods and tactics. The reason we did not deploy them between 2013 and 2015 was because there were no attacks against us [by the Turkish state]. Since 2015, however, that is to say for almost 10 years now, in order to defend our existence and to ward off the Turkish state’s attacks that have continued non stop, we refined and developed the tunnel system and established fortresses of resistance
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