PKK vows to intensify militant attacks against Turkish forces

A leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) says the group will boost its assaults on Turkish army forces if the Ankara government continues its military campaign against the Kurds.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “wants the Kurds to surrender. If they don’t surrender, he wants to kill all Kurds. He says this openly, he doesn’t hide it,” Cemil Bayik said in an interview with the BBC news network published on Monday.

He added, “The Kurds will defend themselves to the end, so long as this is the Turkish approach, of course the PKK will escalate the war.”

Bayik further insisted that the PKK does not intend to create a separate Kurdish state within Turkey.

“We don’t want to divide Turkey. We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely... The struggle will continue until the Kurds’ innate rights are accepted,” he said.

He went on to say that the Turkish government’s intransigence has made the PKK ready to intensify the conflict “not only in Kurdistan, but in the rest of Turkey as well.”

Bayik said the Turkey-PKK conflict “can only be resolved through negotiations,” stressing that the PKK would engage in dialog only if “the Turkish state gives up its genocidal politics.”

Bayik also touched upon the situation of PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is incarcerated in the prison island of Imrali on the Marmara Sea, saying that Ankara must improve his prison conditions before any ceasefire talks could resume.

“For over a year, there have been no visits to him, there is no information on or from him. There cannot be any negotiations under these circumstances,” he said.

A ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government collapsed in July 2015 and attacks on Turkish security forces have soared since.

Erdogan said earlier this month that 355 members of the Turkish security forces have lost their lives in operations against the PKK, while over 5,000 Kurdish fighters have been killed.

Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the PKK in its southern border region in the past few months. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq and Syria.

The operations began in the wake of a deadly July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc. More than 30 people died in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.

After the bombing, the PKK militants, who accuse the government in Ankara of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish police and security forces, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

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