Turkey’s Kurdish party says Syria deal leaves Ankara ‘no excuses’ on peace process

By Ece Toksabay

ANKARA, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party said on Monday that the Turkish government had no more “excuses” to delay a peace process with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) now that ‍a landmark integration deal was achieved in neighbouring Syria.

On Sunday in Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to come under the control of authorities in Damascus – a move that Ankara had long sought as integral to its own peace effort with the PKK.

“For more than a year, the government has presented the SDF’s integration ‌with Damascus as the biggest obstacle to the process,” ‌Tuncer Bakirhan, co-leader of the DEM Party, told Reuters, in some of the party’s first public comments on the deal in Syria.

“The government will no longer have any excuses left. Now it is the government’s turn to take concrete steps.”

Bakirhan ​cautioned President Tayyip Erdogan’s government against concluding that the rolling back Kurdish territorial gains in Syria negated the need for a peace process in ‍Turkey.

“If the government calculates that ‘we have weakened ​the Kurds in Syria, so there is no longer a ​need for a process in Turkey,’ it would be making a historic mistake,” ‍he said in the interview.

Turkish officials said earlier on Monday that the Syrian integration deal, if implemented, could advance the more than year-long process with the PKK, which is based in northern Iraq. Erdogan urged swift integration of Kurdish fighters into Syria’s armed forces.

Turkey, the strongest foreign backer ‍of Damascus, has since 2016 repeatedly sent forces into northern Syria to curb the gains of the SDF – which after the 2011–2024 civil war had controlled ‍more than a quarter ‍of Syria while fighting Islamic State with strong U.S. ​backing.

The United States has built close ties with Damascus ​over the ⁠last year and was closely involved in mediation between ‌it and the SDF toward the deal.

Bakirhan said progress required recognition of Kurdish rights on both sides of the border.

“What needs to be done is clear: Kurdish rights must be recognized in both Turkey and Syria, democratic regimes must be established, and freedoms must be guaranteed,” he said.

(Reporting by Ece ToksabayEditing by Tomasz Janowski ⁠and Jonathan Spicer)