with the united states and the fact of, you know, turkey opening injured there after and probably persuaded them that that indeed was what this was all about. and i think the pkk is on the one hand saying to the turkish government, if you continue to try to undermine us, this is what we ll do. and on the other hand, it s also saying that if you continue to undermine the kurdish movement inside turkey, if you continue to try to marginalize the hdp that s sort of where we disagree i m going to make turkey ungovernable for you. this is sort of a way of saying, if you re going to play hardball with me, i m going to play hardball with you. and very few of us actually predicted this, because we all seemed to believe that when the pkk was bogged down in this fight against the islamic state it could hardly afford to open up a second front against turkey, but in a very eironic twist in a certain sense, it s america that enabled it to do so, because america rode to the rescue with
the predominantly kurdish areas that have diverted this rural mountainous combat into the urban setting. which means that now we have a setting in which there s more civilian involvement and also more potential civilian casualties as well. what about the pkk? in 1990s, pkk was pretty much a monolithic top-down entity with very compact decision making. turkey s argument and position throughout the 1990s was very clear. get rid of pkk s leadership and the organization is going to collapse. in 2015, we have a much different pkk which has decided to engage in splintering strategy, especially valid after the arrests and capture of its founding leader in 1999. the 2015 pkk is much more different than the 1990s pkk in the sense that decision making is more localized, clashes and command is also more localized, even though the central executive body is quite influential as well. main difference is the emergence of localized leadership that younger cohort used to be the bridge between