The Kurdish issue is a key issue in Turkey’s both domestic and regional policies. While in Turkey, the existence of non-Turkish peoples has not been recognized, the Kurds inhabiting the eastern regions of the country fought for their national rights. The main force of the armed resistance since 1984 has been the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Detachments of Kurdish guerrillas also took refuge in Iraq and Syria, and Turkish troops regularly invaded Iraq. During the Syrian civil war since 2011, Turkey supported Islamist and Turkoman units, armed them and paid the militants’ upkeep. At the same time, the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Self-Defense Units (YPJ) were among the main allies of the American troops and formed the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Turkey, with the help of Israel, managed to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad and help bring the Islamists to power in Syria, having defeated the Lebanese “Hezbollah” and the Iranian “Axis of Resistance”. In Turkey itself, Kurdish leader Abdullah calan initiated the self-dissolution of the PKK, which forced the Syrian Kurds to conclude an agreement with the Islamist government to end the armed struggle. The article traces the evolution of Turkey’s contemporary policy on the Kurdish issue in Turkey and Syria, including its doctrinal base and political-military aspects. The self-dissolution of the PKK is explained not only by pressure from Ankara and political pragmatism on the part of Kurdish leaders, but also by the evolution of calan’s own views under the influence of eco-anarchism in favor of democratic confederalism. It is concluded that the Syrian Kurds’ real experiment in implementing the ideas of democratic confederalism, which contradicts the approaches of both the Islamist authorities of Syria supported by Ankara and the Turkish leadership, serves as a greater challenge for Turkey than its accusations against Syrian Kurds of supporting PKK terrorism. Serious doubts are expressed about the success of both the process of disarming the PKK units in Turkey and the attempts of the new Islamist authorities in Syria and the Syrian Kurds to reach an agreement among themselves.
V. Nadein-Raevskii (Wed,) studied this question.