Utilising the chaos in Syria in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, Turkey has mobilised its military along with militias it sponsors along the border with Kurdish-held Syrian territories in what appears to be a preparation for an imminent invasion, according to a report
More like never liked terrorist supporters.
Turkey’s population consists of roughly %18 kurds, claiming Turkey doesnt like them would be an outrageous claim considering they are citizens of the country and their votes make a significant impact in the selection of the governing parties.
They have pushed the government enough to try out a peaceful resolution against the PKK, only for PKK to bomb trap civilian buildings while the peace negotiations were going on. After that whole ordeal, a significant amount of the Kurds in Turkey see PKK as a terrorist organization that does more harm than good.
SDF is pretty much a sidearm PKK located in Syria, and it’s pretty understandable why Turkey doesn’t want them right next to their border.
How can there be Kurds in Turkey if Kurds don’t even exist? And this is not a thing of the past, school books denying an independent identity of Kurds were printed as recently as 2021.
Turks do happen to suck at acknowledging their genocides. The Armenian is often spoken about outside of Turkey, everyone always forgets the Kurds.
This is outright misinformation. Kurds are specifically mentioned in history classes as in “ethnic groups that lives in various regional areas of Turkey”, I recall this from my college times, roughly 2016.
There is nowhere close to a genocide against Kurds considering the amount of Kurds that live there; however Turkey has every right to stop a extremist rebellion idea that would make it lose territory and distrupt the unity between its citizens.
So you deny the existence of those newer school books? Do you deny that the Kurdish language was outlawed for a very long time which constitutes genocide on its own, do you deny the various forced relocations and massacres the Turkish army committed against Kurds before the PKK was even founded? Decades before?
You might have heard the term “Kurd”, yes, but chances are you also learned stuff like “Kurdish is a Turkish dialect” (Kurdish is not even part of the same language family), “Mountain Turk”, “Atatürk did nothing wrong”, etc.
The Kurds in Turkey are policed by the military, not allowed to speak their language, and largely forced to the bottom of society. They’re treated worse than the Isrealis treat the Arabs who legally live in Israel proper. We’ve also seen what military reprisals look like in Turkey and Northern Iraq.
The Turks never wanted peace. They wanted Genocide but the Kurds armed themselves.
I am not the best person to characterize the situation, but…
…it seems that Turkish authorities have always felt very threatened by any ideas of Kurdish autonomy (even cultural autonomy). Domestically, they have been locked in a fight with PKK, that is true. But in recent times - since the civil war started in Syria - they have great difficulty telling PKK apart from YPG. One is an underground terrorist organization, the other is a uniformed military. But when the PKK does something, very often as a result - YPG get bombed.
On the brighter side, Turkey has had a president of partly Kurdish ancestors (Turgut Özal). But the darker side of the coin is: he died of poisoning right before he could negotiate for peace with the PKK.
I have a guess. When Turkey starts approaching peace with PKK, either PKK members commit an act of terror to break down negotiations, or Turkish special services kill their own negotiator. Because both organizations contain people who - tragically - think that peace would not be good for their business. Their business is war and they don’t want it entirely stopped.
I hope I’m wrong - or that I have gradually become wrong as times have changed.
They are threatened, look at the Wikipedia page for the current Kurdish party, and then check the past parties and what they have been accused of
If anything is a plus, making 20% of the nation a direct enemy is never good so they have never gone beyond banning parties with plausible reasons, they have always been able to reform them back again and the Kurdish language has been preserved and culture deeply integrated.
Wow, so many lies.