Next steps in Turkey’s Kurdish process and Rojava’s recalibration
A farewell to arms in Turkey, and a negotiated future in Syria—if the moment holds.
Just when many had assumed the negotiation process between the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and the Turkish state had flatlined, something unexpected happened. Despite the political chaos following the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a delegation from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party was granted a meeting with Erdoğan at the presidential palace Beştepe. It lasted one and half hours.
This came after a forty-day silence following Öcalan’s February 27th message—a pause that bore the eerie familiarity of interregnum periods Kurdish politics knows all too well.
Also in the room were MİT chief İbrahim Kalın and AKP deputy chair Efkan Ala, a key actor in the previous peace talks that began in 2013 and collapsed in 2015. The public presence of the intelligence chief signals that this is no longer a feeler round. The process has matured.
Speaking in Rome recently, Pervin Buldan—a member of the committee that visited Öcalan—shared rare insights into the revived talks. “We’ve held three meetings. In each, he emphasized peace, a Turkish-Kurdish alliance, and the democratization of Turkey and the Middle East,” she said.
Öcalan, for his part, reportedly declared: “Fifty years of resistance have passed. Armed struggle will not solve this. I’ve decided: there’s no path forward but peace and disarmament.” He referenced the early republican period, drawing on the cooperation between Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (founder of the Turkish Republic) and İsmet İnönü (his closest ally and successor as president) with Kurdish figures—suggesting that today’s leaders have lost that historical sensibility. “Now it’s time for a final farewell to arms,” he said.
The expectation on the Kurdish side is clear: legal amendments easing Öcalan’s imprisonment. That could mean house arrest, or a comparable status under Turkish state protection. The committee is scheduled to meet with the Minister of Justice next, followed by another visit to İmralı. According to both state sources and the DEM delegation, the process could culminate by June 2025.
In a similar vein, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warned that dragging the process out could invite external disruption. Previous disarmament efforts, he noted, “were overridden by international signals that outweighed internal ones. It could happen again.”
The next meeting between Öcalan and the DEM delegation is therefore pivotal. At that visit, he is expected to draft—or possibly video record—a message to be delivered to the upcoming PKK congress, scheduled for May 5 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. Whether it takes the form of a written letter or a video, the message will carry immense symbolic and strategic weight.
Sources suggest Turkey’s intelligence agency has already begun preparing for the next steps, anticipating the PKK’s long-awaited declaration of disbandment at its upcoming congress. If and when it happens, the impact will be momentous—not just for Turkey, but for the entire region.
Mazlum Kobane and Ahmad Al- Sharra
The fair question is: what has pushed the Kurdish process forward at a moment when Turkey appears to be sliding deeper into authoritarianism—arresting Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most serious rival, on trumped-up charges?
The answer is Syria.
It was the establishment of a semi-autonomous canton in northeastern Syria—Rojava—led by the PYD/YPG (now the SDF), that prompted the collapse of the earlier peace process in 2015. Now, a decade later, it’s again developments in that same geography, by the same actors, that have revived the talks inside Turkey.
On March 10, Mazlum Kobane—the SDF’s commander-in-chief—signed a landmark agreement with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa. With that signature, Rojava’s military and civilian structures are now en route to integration with the Syrian state.
According to Kobane, this isn’t a tactical ceasefire—it’s a structural realignment. Turkish airstrikes have halted. Armed clashes around the Tishreen Dam have stopped. The SDF and Damascus will now jointly manage vital infrastructure. Sheikh Maqsoud, long under SDF control, has returned to nominal state authority.
At the center of it all is Kobane’s pragmatism. He calls the Sheikh Maqsoud agreement “a model, not the model.” Without constitutional guarantees, it remains provisional. A new Syrian constitution—decentralized, democratic, and inclusive—is the demand. Not only from Kurds, but also Arabs, Alawites, and others excluded from the old Baathist power structure.
But that new order has enemies. The recent bloodshed in the Alawite coastal belt made that brutally clear. Sharaa blames remnants of the Assad regime. There is a commission investigating the violence—its independence questionable, yes—but the mere existence of such a body marks a departure. For Kobane, the massacre only underscored the stakes. Power must be redistributed, violence de-escalated, and accountability institutionalized if Syria is to avoid a second collapse.
In the background, Öcalan’s message hovers. Kobane—speaking in an exclusive interview with my colleague Amberin Zaman at Al-Monitor—referred to a letter from Öcalan that I mentioned in this newsletter a few weeks ago. In it, Öcalan urged the SDF to adopt a pan-Syrian agenda and stressed that the future must be negotiated, not fought for. Kobane embraced this advice and echoed the sentiment: the time for armed struggle is over.
This led to a shift in Ankara’s tone. The “terrorist” rhetoric is vanishing from official statements. No direct contact, says Kobane—but no hostility either. His deal with Sharaa would’ve been inconceivable without Turkey’s silent nod. Just days ago, the Turkish Ministry of Defense used the label “SDF” for the first time in an official readout—instead of the usual “groups affiliated with the terrorist PKK.” If the disbandment of the PKK proceeds, it will offer Ankara an honorable exit route: tolerating a semi-autonomous SDF-led region without having to concede too much, as I’ve tried to explain in my earlier post.
And the Americans? They facilitated Kobane’s travel and quietly backed the talks. Washington wants no fresh war between Turkey and the SDF. More urgently, they want no security vacuum that ISIS could exploit. Recent movements suggest that U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw. A stable transition is critical.
The deal between the SDF and Damascus is only the beginning—and the path ahead remains fragile. Committees comprising members from both the Syrian government and the SDF will manage sectors like oil, education, security, and constitutional reform. Kobane is clear about red lines: no return to Assad’s centralism. No dismantling of the SDF. Integration into the Syrian army must mean parity, not subordination. Arab units will remain intact. Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor’s status will be addressed later.
But the direction is unmistakable: a semi-autonomous Kurdish administration—retaining what it has, forging closer ties with Damascus, and gaining a greater say in Syria’s political future.
The real shift is this: the Kurds are no longer defending a corner of Syria.
They are helping reimagine it.