Kurdish leader Ocalan told the PKK to disband, it did: Here’s what to know

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) says it is disbanding after more than 40 years of armed struggle against the Turkish state.

The announcement came after the PKK held its congress in northern Iraq on Friday, about two months after its imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan, also known as “Appo”, called on the group to disarm in February.For most of its history, the PKK has been labelled a terrorist group by Turkiye, the European Union and the United States. It fought for Kurdish autonomy for years, a fight that has been declared over now.

This is all you need to know about why Ocalan and the PKK have given up their armed struggle.

Who is Abdullah Ocalan?
Ocalan was born to a poor Kurdish farming family on April 4, 1948, in Omerli, Sanliurfa, a Kurdish-majority part of Turkiye.

He moved to Ankara to study political science at the university there, where he became politically active; driven, biographers say, by the sense of marginalisation that many Kurds in Turkiye felt.

By the mid-1970s, he was advocating for Kurdish nationalism and went on to found the PKK in 1978.