In the distant mists of mythological time, a cruel Assyrian despot devoured two Kurdish boys every day—digesting their brains assuaged his own morbid condition. One day, in this origin myth of the Kurdish people, the father of one boy refused to comply with the demand and led a rebellion in the mountains. This father, Kawa the Blacksmith, succeeded in overthrowing the evil tyrant, and as a signal to the people in the valley below, he set a bonfire to alert them that they were now free.
For centuries this mythological liberation has been celebrated at Newroz, the Kurdish (and Persian) new year, on March 21. In 2026, Kurds are still seeking liberation from non-Kurdish tyrants, like Erdoğan in Turkey, the neo-jihadist Al-Sharaa in Syria, and the mullahs in Iran. It’s the Kurds’ most important annual feast. They dress in traditional costume and pour into city streets, not merely to celebrate tradition but to affirm their identity in an act of communal defiance. In March 2026 Global South Watch traveled to the Kurdish capital city, Diyarbakir, to find out how the Kurds’ long-standing march to freedom is progressing.
Türkiye is home to some 20 million Kurds, concentrated in their ancestral region in the southeast, although millions also now live in Istanbul. In Türkiye as in Syria and Iran, Kurds have faced persecution and massacres at the hands of intransigent rulers who would prefer that they didn’t exist and who systematically arrest and imprison Kurdish politicians, journalists, culture workers, and other activists, in an effort to annihilate what they cannot assimilate.
In fact, most of the Kurds we met on this visit had been to prison at least once, often more. The charge is almost always the same: a connection (real or imagined) to the PKK, which the state calls “terrorism.” Mostly charges are fiction, but judges sentence them anyway. Sometimes they languish behind bars for decades. When it comes to Kurds, the rule of law seems missing. Shocking to outsiders, who might find even a few weeks in prison unbearable, serial imprisonment is a way of life among Kurds.
As a beleaguered minority in several West Asian autocracies, Kurds were long unable to find a way to fight for their rights and recognition. So in 1984, lacking all recourse, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) went to war with the Turkish state. Unlike Kawa’s rebellion, the PKK war has not yet led to liberation. But in 2025 a peace process opened, and the Kurdish armed force symbolically laid down arms. Since then, talks have been under way between Ankara and Kurdish leaders.
[quotes about the peace process from Eren Keskin and others]
The talks are taking place out of sight, so no observers know their content or can predict whether the process will bear fruit. Kurds themselves have reason to be skeptical, as this is not the first time the PKK and the Turkish state have engaged in peace talks, and many Kurds are wary of having their hopes once again dashed.
But hoping against hope is part of what Kurds do. After all, the Kurdish question is the largest and most persistent rift in Turkish society, since the 1923 founding of the Turkish republic, and it must ultimately be resolved.
Diyarbakir itself is home to tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees: in 1992-93 the Turkish state, in an effort to destroy PKK hiding places, razed nearby Kurdish villages, burning them to the ground, killing countless inhabitants. Many of those who survived fled here. [like Omer’s parents—get quote?]
Human rights lawyer Eren Keskin explained why the Turkish state is so hostile to Kurdish citizens: [ideology]
As their struggle evolved over the years, Kurds today demand not only their own rights and recognition but for the democratization of the Turkish state. [quote from ____] [other human rights issues—the disa ppeared--Jiyan Tosun]
The visitor to Kurdistan will notice immediately the presence of strong women in the society and politics—highly unusual in West Asia. A major reason is the teachings of Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader, wiseman, and philosopher, who insisted that Kurdish men must eliminate the toxic masculinity within them (“kill the man”) and support the empowerment of women in all aspects of life hitherto regarded as men’s exclusive domains. Another reason for the presence of empowered women is that in the 1990s women PKK fighters formed women’s battalions that effectively demonstrated women’s military prowess.
The struggle for women’s empowerment continued within Kurdish political parties, which initially in the 1990s were male-dominated. For twenty-five years, Kurdish women have engaged in a struggle that took them from serving coffee and xeroxing speeches, to gaining party leadership positions, to earning nominations as candidates to run for office, to getting elected in their own right. Around 2014 cities and villages in the Turkish heartland elected co-mayors, one man and one woman, to ensure not only gender parity but broad participation of all citizens in self-government.
Gültan Kisanak, former co-mayor of Diyarbakir, explains: [quote from Kisanak]
As co-mayors, Kurdish women created services—for health, education, and employment--and other means of serving the community, with a focus on women. [quotes from Çağlar Demirel; Sebahat Tuncel]
In 2016 the Turkish state, apparently horrified by Kurdish women empowerment, replaced these duly elected, popular co-mayors with appointed “trustees,” or kayyums, accountable not to the people but to the AKP government. It arrested Kisanak and other women officeholders and sentenced them to years in prison, because that is what it does to those it fears. [more details] The “trustees” undid the service work that the co-mayors had implemented. [quotes from Mayor Serra Bucak; Hülya A.U.]
Kurds understand that while they are a large minority, they are not large enough to achieve their goals on their own. So they ally with other groups under the umbrella of the HDK. Those components include labor unions, identity groups, women’s groups, and more.
[quote from Esengül about what HDK is]
[quote from Sebahat Tuncel about HDK, which she co-founded]
[quote from Aysel about inclusion of, for example, Circassians in the party][
quote from X about Dem Party]
CONTINUATION
