SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has released names and photos of the two Turkish intelligence officers it captured inside the Kurdistan Region in August, three days after Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu called for the resumption of peace talks ahead of general elections.
The two Turkish nationals have been named by the PKK as Erhan Pekcetin and Aydin Gunel, “senior officials” who had worked for the Turkish intelligence service, MIT, for 20 years.
The PKK claimed they were trying to carry out an operation inside the Kurdistan Region against the PKK, but were captured before they were able to begin.
At the time that the PKK seized the two, an official said they would not publish personal details of the men in order to not “create problems,” but warned they will in the future, if necessary.
Releasing their names and details on Wednesday, the PKK said they are “safe” and being treated well.
The Kurdish group said Pekcetin and Gunel had been operating inside the Kurdistan Region on diplomatic passports on an operation that had been ordered by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the head of MIT Hakan Fidan and had taken months of planning.
The PKK said they were able to retrieve valuable information from Pekcetin and Gunel, including about the assassination of PKK co-founder Sakine Cansiz in Paris in 2013. The PKK blamed Turkey for the killing at the time, a charge denied by Ankara.
A court proceeding was stopped when the main suspect mysteriously died in a prison in France.
Diyar Xerib, a senior PKK member, said in August that the MIT operation the two were involved in was supposed to take place in Kurdistan Region’s Sulaimani province, stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
“No doubt the PKK can publish news about the arrest of the MIT officials who wanted to make the Sulaimani area a place to carry out their dirty operations, the biggest of which was to assassinate a prominent PKK official,” Xerib said then. He said they were refraining from publishing the men’s details because this would have put the PUK in a difficult situation.
Ankara expelled the PUK’s representative to Turkey, Behruz Galalai, in August before the news broke about the arrest of the MIT operatives.
Saadi Pira, a senior PUK official, said in August that Turkey had conducted a “failed operation” in Sulaimani that inflicted damage on Turkey.
Turkey confirmed the arrest of the two, but did not give details of their activities in the Kurdistan Region.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Cavusoglu said on Monday that Ankara is open to restarting the peace process with the PKK, if the Kurdish group ceases its armed activities.
“If the PKK lays down its arms, it is possible that the peace process will restart,” he said in an interview with the German news agency DPA.
Cavusoglu later took to Twitter to clarify his comments. “In my interview with the DPA [I said that] the PKK only exploited the peace process, and now our people, particularly Kurds, want us to fight the PKK until the end.”
“The precondition we have offered to deal with the child-killer PKK terror organization shall be published in the news. As we have promised our people, no force can stop us until we eradicate the PKK terror organization by its roots,” he continued.
The PKK, which is marking its 40th anniversary this year, is a named terrorist organization in Turkey, the United States, and Europe. It has carried out a rebellion against the Turkish state to achieve greater national and cultural rights for millions of Kurds in the country.
Peace negotiations between Ankara and the PKK that continued for about two years failed when the two sides resumed fighting in July 2015.
According to the International Crisis Group at least 3,338 people have been killed in the two and a half years of clashes. That number includes 1,036 state security forces and 1,646 PKK fighters.
