Let's try to keep the discussion limited to what is publicly known and attestable, shall we? If we start basing discussion off "well, obviously they're doing X" or "I heard they were doing Y" we can nosedive into tinfoil hat territory pretty quickly.
The Kurdish situation is complicated, to say the least. (And here I'm going to go and violate what I just said by using info that, while unclassified, isn't exactly public knowledge)
There was a big dustup within the PKK about 4-5 years ago, as the new AKP government in Turkey used a stick-and-carrot approach, making amnesty offers for PKK members that would disarm and surrender, while simultaneously ramping up military pressure. That ramping up of military pressure made things kind of dicey for a while there, when the Turks were beginning to make cross-border incursions into Iraq, royally pissing off the KUP/PDK (two Iraqi Kurdish groups) who controlled the north of Iraq with US support. They finally backed off, but the overall campaign worked well. There was also an issue of a few weapons caches captured by the Turkish Army which had some pretty state-of-the-art US gear in them, and indications that these were being sold by Blackwater, the mercenary company that the US was using in Iraq. But anyways...
The reason it worked so well was that there was an internal schism within the PKK between the Turkish-born Kurds (who were favoring some kind of negotiated settlement and political representation, similar to what the IRA achieved in Ireland) and a faction of Syrian-born Kurds who were advocating greater use of terrorist tactics and some kind of alignment with al-Qaeda. The combination of pressure and incentives worked well on the Turkish faction, and a number of PKK turned themselves in (and ratted out their Syrian rivals). There was no clear connection to indicate that the Syrian faction was in any way actively supported by Syria, but certainly the Turks thought that to be the case.
When you look at the PKK's tactics and modus operandi, they form two distinct groups. In the Kurdish-dominated southeastern provinces like Hakkari, Van and Diyarbakir they're essentially an armed insurgency. It's military tactics (ambushes, landmines, armed assaults) on military targets (army outposts, convoys, village militias). In the urban western provinces, they're a terrorist group. It's car bombs, drive-by grenade attacks, assassinations, etc. And the targets are typically civilian and/or Turkish government. The Turkish faction favored the armed insurgency approach, while the Syrian faction favored the terrorist approach.
In any case, whatever "honeymoon" period existed after the 2007 campaign seems to have worn off, as the PKK has been active of late in the east, which seems to indicate that the Turkish faction still holds sway within the PKK. I haven't followed the news and analysis closely the last couple of years so I'm not sure if the Syrian faction was purged, or is still there.
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Topic: Egypt and the world and Libya - Now without Ukraine! (Read 377171 times)