Progress or deadlock? Terror-Free Türkiye at the crossroads

The terror-free Türkiye initiative is either advancing with deliberate discipline or stalling under the weight of its own contradictions. A year after the PKK announced its formal dissolution, the expected legislative steps have not materialized, back-channel contacts have grown intermittent and the regional environment has been upended by two successive shocks: The military reorganization of northeastern Syria and the outbreak of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Whether these developments are compressing the process toward a conclusion or pulling it apart depends entirely on which strategic logic one applies. The PKK side calls the current moment a freeze. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls it sequenced, verified progress. The AK Party’s position and the PKK’s countercalculus are not merely different readings of the same reality; they are structurally opposed wagers on who moves first and under what conditions.

Government’s logic

President Erdoğan’s April 2026 address to the AK Party parliamentary group was unambiguous: “We set out on this road. We will walk patiently until we reach the destination.” He dismissed those seeking to “undermine” the process as noise Ankara would not entertain. This is the articulation of a model the AK Party has described from the outset as a “zip-fastener system”: Each legal or administrative step contingent on the verified completion of the preceding one in the field.

The core rationale is credible verification. AK Party sources point to intelligence indicating that significant PKK positions along the Kandil line remain occupied and that weapons stockpiles have not been fully cleared. The lesson Ankara draws from the 2013-2015 process, which collapsed without a verification mechanism, is that steps taken without field confirmation are accelerants of deeper mistrust rather than irreversible gains. The delay in introducing the framework law is therefore not reluctance but structural discipline: Legislation will follow verified facts on the ground. Security services have intensified contacts along both the Imralı and Kandil channels, working on formulas to incentivize real disarmament.

It is precisely this contact architecture that gives context to Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli’s latest proposal. He argued that with the PKK formally dissolved, the jailed ringleader of the PKK terrorist group, Abdullah Öcalan’s role as “founding leader” of the organization has become legally and politically redundant. What is needed in its place is a new mechanism, a “Peace Process and Politicization Coordinatorship,” through which Öcalan could continue to exercise influence over the organization’s remaining cadres and regional affiliates, directing the completion of disarmament without being formally released.

Poll results

A crucial and often underreported dimension is that public support has remained substantially intact. Polling consistently places backing for negotiations in the 55-65% range across Turkish society, crossing both Turkish nationalist and Kurdish constituencies. This gives the government meaningful room to absorb hardline criticism on both flanks without facing an immediate electoral cost.

Yet the same polling reveals a structural anxiety: The majority of those who support the talks do not believe they will succeed, and only one in three expects the PKK to genuinely abandon armed struggle. This gap between support and confidence is the process’ most delicate sociological variable. The government has public permission to continue, but not an indefinite license to delay. Sustained opacity without visible progress will, over time, erode the confidence baseline even among those who back the initiative in principle.

Syria, Iran, shifting frame

The internal sequencing dispute cannot be read in isolation from two external shocks that have fundamentally altered the process’ frame of reference. The first was Syria. The January 2026 offensive by Syrian government forces brought approximately 80% of territories under YPG, the Syrian offshoot of PKK, under Damascus’ control, effectively dismantling the institutional architecture of so-called Kurdish autonomy in northeastern Syria. For Ankara, this was not a separate file. Türkiye’s endgame in Syria has always mirrored its domestic ambition: To see the YPG follow the PKK’s path, disbanding its military structures and converting into a purely political actor operating within the Syrian national framework. Erdoğan’s coordination with Damascus on this objective was a calculated extension of the broader strategy. Yet the same development produced an unwanted internal effect.

The second and more structurally consequential shock is the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which began in February 2026. Türkiye and Iran had for decades managed the Kurdish question in parallel, not as allies but as two states sharing a convergent interest in preventing Kurdish territorial consolidation. When that framework is destabilized, the bounded containment it underpinned begins to unravel.

PJAK, the PKK’s Iranian affiliate that had already rejected Öcalan’s disarmament call, found itself at the center of a dangerous dilemma as the war opened a power vacuum along the Turkish border’s southern approaches. Reports that Washington and Tel Aviv discussed arming Kurdish factions inside Iran were received in Ankara as confirmation of a feared scenario: The domestic disarmament process being flanked by externally activated armed Kurdish actors in a different geography.

Erdoğan communicated directly with Washington that Türkiye would not tolerate the use of PKK-linked organizations as proxies, regardless of the ongoing peace process. The Iran war has effectively shifted the process from a post-disarmament political reform paradigm toward risk management under regional unpredictability, compressing the AK Party government’s appetite for legislative action precisely when it is most needed.

PKK’s dual calculus

To read this process solely through Ankara’s logic is to miss half the picture. The PKK’s leadership operates with its own dual calculus shaped by the same regional upheaval. The first dimension is risk. The January 2026 YPG agreement with Damascus obliged the expulsion of non-Syrian PKK members from Syrian territory and the dismantlement of YPG command structures, effectively closing the PKK’s most strategically significant external theater.

Northeastern Syria had served for years as a buffer zone, recruitment ground and political showcase. Its loss, imposed under Turkish and Syrian government pressure with Washington’s tacit endorsement, was experienced inside Qandil not as a negotiated outcome but as a defeat. The Iran war deepened this anxiety: PJAK’s battle-tested cadres represented a real military asset, but the Kandil leadership read the window of U.S. encouragement with caution.

The second dimension is recalibration. The cease-fire declared in March 2025 removed the operational pressure that Turkish military campaigns in northern Iraq had sustained for years. With strikes suspended under the logic of the peace process, Kandil’s remaining structures have had, for the first time in years, a period of relative operational freedom. Intelligence assessments suggest mountain positions remain occupied and some stockpile reinforcement has occurred. From the PKK’s own perspective, preserving latent military capacity in a rapidly transforming region is the rational posture of a movement with no legal guarantees, no confirmed amnesty framework and no verified commitment that political reforms will follow disarmament.

The crossroads

This symmetry of caution is the process’s central structural problem and paradoxically its best evidence that both sides remain invested in its continuation. Armed organizations that have abandoned a process do not maintain a cease-fire for 15 months. Governments that have abandoned a process do not sustain back-channel contacts with Imralı and Kandil simultaneously. The terror-free Türkiye process has completed a genuinely historic first phase: The PKK’s formal dissolution, the symbolic weapons ceremony, and the multi-party parliamentary commission. The second phase, requiring legislation, political reintegration and durable trust-building, has not yet opened.

The defining question is whether Ankara’s strategic patience is operating according to the logic of a transitional period that genuinely prepares the ground for settlement, or whether the regional power shifts are quietly transforming that patience into a permanent deferral that sacrifices the reform agenda to security priorities. What is truly at stake is whether the new order being constructed across the region, the erosion of Kurdish autonomy in Syria and the unsettled balance of power in Iran acts as a burden on Türkiye’s domestic peace agenda or as a source of momentum for it. The terror-free Türkiye initiative represents a historically singular opportunity. Whether it is strengthened by the surrounding turbulence or buried beneath it is the most consequential open question of this moment.

DAILYSABAH