ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— With over one thousand people killed on both sides of the ongoing Turkey-PKK conflict many are still trying to understand why the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), after decades of guerrilla warfare fighting in the mountains, decided to fight the Turkish military in urban areas where they are much more vulnerable. “Qandil was receiving the wrong intelligence from the cities,” said an unnamed older man in Diyarbakir in a recent TV interview. “They had been told that people in the cities would rise up and fight the army. This is why they brought the guns to the cities and dug the ditches,” the old man continued. “But nothing happened. At least not what Qandil had expected,” he added. Qandil Mountains is where the PKK leadership is based. The unidentified old man is hardly the only critic of the PKK's urban warfare campaign. The PKK’s moderate military leader Murat Qereyallan also questioned the party’s strategy in bringing the war to cities when he told PKK’s official media outlets that, “the war shouldn’t have taken place in the cities.” Even PKK’s leading hawk, Duran Kallkan, seen as one of the architects behind this strategy, regretted the loss of so many lives in what he called “the army’s unpredictable cruelty.” “We thought they were humans even if they were our enemies. But we were wrong and made mistakes. We never expected them to attack so indiscriminately, there are simply too many casualties,” Kallkan told PKK media in late February. Turkey’s own human rights groups described the army’s recent operations as “the bloodiest of the three-decade long conflict” in the country. “You [the PKK] will be annihilated in those houses, those buildings, those ditches which you have dug,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in December, speaking to a crowd of his supporters in the central Anatolian city of Konya. “Our security forces will continue this fight until the PKK has been completely cleansed and a peaceful atmosphere established.” Hussein Turhanli, a former PKK member, believes that Ankara’s willingness to start a war against the PKK shouldn’t be underestimated. To say the PKK only relied on their intelligence in the Kurdish cities, he said, when making the decision to mobilize for urban warfare would be far too simplistic. “PKK would never start an operation only based on intelligence reports,” Turhanli told Rudaw. “Such reports only determine the timing of the operation if the PKK has a plan for the operation.” Turhanli believes the escalation had much to do with the fate of the Kurdish enclave in Syria and that both Erdogan and the PKK have much at stake in Rojava whose future is uncertain. But other former PKK members say that the group had heavily relied on popular support in Kurdish cities. “After all they had up to 90 percent support in cities like Jazira, Silopi, ands Nuseibin based on the votes people cast for the HDP,” says Dursen Ali Kucuk, a senior PKK member who broke away from the party in 2004, referring to the People’s Democratic Union which received 13 percent of the votes in Turkey’s June elections. “But digging the ditches and waiting for an uprising was simply the wrong policy to pursue,” said Ali Kucuk arguing that Ankara would have attacked the PKK even if they didn’t have the ditches. “Turkish politics failed in both Rojava and Iraq where Ankara has not had a lot to say lately. The PKK would have gained more if it showed restraint; instead they paved the way for the Turkish army to slaughter people in the cities,” he said. But Metin Gurcen, a Turkish security analyst, believes the PKK needed to leave the mountains and become 'a city-party.' The war in the towns gave the party that opportunity, he says. “It has become an indisputable fact that PKK sympathizers in the cities now know how to use a gun and are now more radical. And with that PKK has become popular in the cities.”
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