Kurdish Families Honor the Fallen as Peace Process Moves Forward

Menal Konak’s brother, Mahmut, was 18 when he left to join the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria in 2014. He died six years ago, but she only found out this week.

The Turkish authorities have now begun publishing lists of fallen fighters associated with the PKK, following the recent parliamentary passage of a law designed to reintegrate Kurdish combatants into civilian life.

“He fell in 2020, and we are only finding out now. We spoke to him just once, in 2017, and thought he was alive,” Konak, 31, said tearfully, her face etched with profound grief. “There are so many others like him. They fell so that we could live free. They sacrificed themselves for us.”

Like many Kurdish families, Konak does not know where her brother’s remains are. In the absence of graves, local communities have established spaces of remembrance in several parts of Istanbul and the southeastern region of Turkey, home to large Kurdish communities.

At one memorial located in a nondescript apartment block in the Kucukcekmece district of Istanbul, Vasile Uskas, her head draped in white, mourned her daughter, who also left to join the PKK in 2014.

“We still hoped that she would come home, alive or dead,” she said. “We were waiting for a sign, but we didn’t know where she was, or what her life was like. We knew nothing.”

These designated places of remembrance allow families and relatives to gather and pay their respects, despite the lack of a physical grave. Non-governmental organizations, such as Mebya Der, have assisted in setting up these spaces.

At the Kucukcekmece memorial on Saturday, Ilhami Kurt, vice-president of Mebya Der, stated they were honoring eight fallen fighters. “The news arrived recently. Until now, families were waiting and holding onto hope. With this peace process, even if it is only the symbolic gravestones of their children, people want to find them,” he said.

“The fact that peace is at the heart of the process initiated by the Turkish authorities at the end of 2024—that people sit down around a table—gives meaning to the struggle,” he added.

Between speeches, photographs of the fallen fighters and videos in which they explain to the camera why they joined the PKK were shown. Slogans in Kurdish and peace signs accompanied the images.

First Step

Latif Kol has known since 1994 that his younger brother was dead. He left at the start of the guerrilla war against the Turkish state in the early 1990s.

But he has only just received official confirmation.

“It’s thanks to them that we can speak Kurdish today. Before, we couldn’t even listen to music cassettes,” he said.

“Our mother had even hidden his photo, she buried it. We never found it.”

“Peace will come, that’s certain,” added Menal. “May there be no more bloodshed, neither on their side nor on ours. May all this blood not have been shed in vain.”

Four decades of fighting have left nearly 50,000 dead, according to the government in Ankara.

Yet the law that has just been adopted is only a first step, stressed Sebahat Tuncel, a former MP for the pro-Kurdish DEM party, which has been closely involved in the process between the government and the PKK and its founder Abdullah Ocalan.

Ocalan, the PKK’s 77-year-old figurehead, has been held in solitary confinement since 1999. “The law says nothing about resolving the Kurdish question. It only talks about disarmament. We still have a lot of work ahead: to use Mr Ocalan’s words, we are only at the first step on a road of thousands of kilometres,” she insisted.

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