An In-Depth Portrait of Murat Karayilan: Field Commander of the PKK

An In-Depth Portrait of Murat Karayilan: Field Commander of the PKK

Murat Karayilan joined the separatist terrorist organization the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan—PKK) in the late 1970s. Right before the military coup that took place in September 1980 in Turkey, Karayilan was among the PKK militants that fled to Syria, where Hafez al-Assad’s regime offered shelter and support to the organization. By 1998, the PKK faced a major crisis: the Syrian regime stopped providing any direct support to the organization and expelled Abdullah Ocalan, its founder and leader, from his safe house in Damascus. In the following months, Turkish authorities captured and imprisoned Ocalan, who called for the PKK’s militants to withdraw from Turkey. In such a critical moment, Karayilan took over from the group’s imprisoned leader, and managed to reorganize the PKK. Since then, while Abdullah Ocalan has maintained a cult-like ideological leadership over PKK members and sympathizers, and despite the internal divisions that recently emerged within the organization, Karayilan has been commonly acknowledged as the organization’s operational leader.  

Since 2003, the turmoil caused in Northern Iraq by Operation Iraqi Freedom gave Karayilan the opportunity to regroup and reorganize the PKK in the Qandil Mountains, located along the Iraqi-Iranian border. In 2005, senior PKK commanders elected Karayilan as president of the Executive Committee of the newly founded Democratic Confederation of Kurdistan (Koma Komalen Kurdistan—KKK), an organization that brought the PKK and other Kurdish groups under a single, unified structure. The KKK was dismantled in 2007 and substituted for the Peoples’ Confederation of Kurdistan (Koma Civaken Kurdistan—KCK). Aimed at the implementation of “democratic confederalism,” a stateless governing model conceived by Abdullah Ocalan, the KCK is still active as an umbrella transnational organization, which includes, among others, the PKK and its offshoot groups in Iraq, Iran and Syria. While Ocalan is the KCK’s honorary president, Karayilan has been confirmed as chairman of the KCK’s Executive Committee, the organization’s main decision-making body. Accordingly, the activities of the Hezen Parastina Gel (HPG—People’s Defense Forces), the armed wing of the KCK, also fall under his nominal authority.  

The extent to which Karayilan is fully in control of HPG operations is unclear. Last June, a Turkish military outpost located near Daglica, along the Turkish-Iraqi border, was attacked and eight Turkish soldiers were killed. Karayilan claimed his organization was not responsible and put the blame for the attack on an unspecified local PKK unit gone rogue, but was later belied by a HPG senior operative, Duran Kalkan, who took full responsibility for the action (Today’s Zaman, June 19, 2012; Star [Istanbul], July 6, 2012). On the other hand, Karayilan seems to be the mastermind behind the new strategy implemented by the organization’s armed branch. As he explained in a recent interview, he wanted his militants to abandon the traditional hit-and-run tactics used against Turkish military forces for a new strategy based on three pillars he defined as “hit, hold and control”—with the ultimate goal of “liberating” a number of Turkish rural villages located near the Iraqi border (al-Jazeera, October 13, 2012). 

The strategy was first applied last summer, when a large formation of armed militants engaged Turkish troops in the outskirts of Semdinli, a district located in the Hakkari province. Clashes started in late July and continued for almost three weeks; Turkey ended up deploying about 5,000 troops in the area. Although militants managed to take control of some areas and to set up improvised checkpoints for a short time, Turkish forces eventually regained the upper hand and pushed the militants back into northern Iraq. Nevertheless, Karayilan seemed positively impressed by the results of the operation. In an interview he gave in August, Karaylin confirmed that “guerrillas want to expand their territory and fortify their positions” inside Turkey as a response to actions carried out by the Turkish military, which, he lamented, was “bombing villages and terrorizing our people every day” (Rudaw, August 9, 2012; Reuters, August 11, 2012).  

From a political standpoint, Karayilan’s leadership also shows an ambivalent nature, as it seems to be based on an allegiance to the PKK’s cause, rather than the KCK’s. In recent media appearances, he has shown a tendency to overlook the impact that KCK militants might have in Syria, Iraq and Iran in terms of potential political achievements, while focusing almost exclusively on Turkey. Even though he stressed how “the Turkish state and other occupiers [of Kurdistan] are doing all they can to prevent Kurds from benefiting from the redesigning and reshaping of the Middle East,” he also downplayed the role that PKK (and, by extension, the KCK and its other subgroups) could potentially play in the region. He systematically refutes any active involvement of his organization in Syria, labeling such rumors as “Turkish propaganda” and also denies any agreement with Assad’s regime. At the same time, Karayilan stresses how the PKK supports peace and democracy in the region, while at the same time the organization “does not accept Turkish interference in Syria” (Rudaw, January 18, 2012; al-Jazeera, October 13, 2012). 

This is not the first instance in which Karayilan seems to prioritize the PKK’s Turkey-centric approach and to overlook the KCK’s transnational goals. Rumors concerning Iranian security forces capturing and then releasing Karayilan became widespread in August 2011, but such claims have remained either unconfirmed or openly denied by different state sources, both in Turkey and Iran (PressTV [Tehran], August 13, 2011; Today’s Zaman, August 14, 2011). The circumstances of Karayilan’s alleged capture and release have never been clarified, so little to no evidence is available to substantiate any claim. What remains indisputable is the fact that the PKK’s Iranian offshoot, the so-called Free Life Party of Kurdistan (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane—PJAK), which was established in 2004, suddenly agreed to implement a ceasefire in September 2011. This raises a reasonable doubt with regard to the possibility that Karayilan reached an agreement with the Iranian regime during his alleged capture. Karayilan has always denied any allegation that tried to link him with Iran and, while confirming that PKK representatives have recently met with Iranian and Syrian officials, he dismissed the news about his capture as a “fabricated report” (al-Jazeera, October 13, 2012). However, the PJAK seems to have simply disappeared from Iranian territory after an eight year-long struggle, and without having obtained any achievement whatsoever, just after Karayilan’s alleged capture and subsequent release.  

As the Syrian crisis unfolds, the shortcomings in Karayilan’s leadership within the KCK have become more visible. He certainly showed he can play realpolitik—after all, he recently admitted that he sent some of his representatives to discuss with both the Iranian and the Syrian regime (al-Jazeera, October 13, 2012). Moreover, Turkish public opinion was caught by surprise when, in mid-2011, a leaked video showed that some senior PKK commanders had met with Turkish officials for secret negotiations and it later turned out this happened with Karayilan’s consent. Murat Karayilan has led the PKK through the crisis it faced in the late 1990s and has been one of the key figures in the establishment of the KCK, an ambitious, transnational project for Kurdish self-rule. His leadership has to face a regional environment that is highly volatile in political terms, and focusing the organization’s efforts on Turkey might be a necessary step to take in order to achieve some concrete results.