The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, or PKK) also suffered a crushing blow with the capture of its charismatic leader. The PKK was founded in 1974 by a group of university students in Ankara, led by Abdullah Öcalan, whose initial goal (like Guzmán’s) was to provoke a rural peasant-based Maoist revolution in Turkey. Through a people’s uprising against the Turkish state, Öcalan hoped to establish an independent Kurdish homeland, encompassing southeast Turkey, and probably also northern Iraq and parts of Syria and Iran. The PKK was structured as a Marxist- socialist
...more
