Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Friday that three more terrorists of the PKK surrendered to security forces, bringing the total number of surrendered terrorists to 32 in the past two months. One of the surrendered was the son of a family who earlier took part in a sit-in to protest the terrorist group.

Yerlikaya said in a social media post that the terrorists were convinced to turn themselves in as a result of efforts of counterterrorism police and police units in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, where the PKK brainwashed young Kurds to join their "cause" for establishing a self-styled Kurdish state.

In its more than 40-year terror campaign against Türkiye, the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the United States, Britain and the European Union, has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, including women, children and infants.

Since the 1980s, Türkiye has been carrying out operations both in the country and beyond its borders, including in Iraq and Syria to root out the terrorist group. The crackdown escalated thanks to a stronger army and advancing defense technology, as well as the expanding work of the intelligence service. Indeed, authorities say the number of active PKK terrorists within Türkiye trickled down to hundreds when they were thousands a few decades ago.

On Friday, counterterrorism police, together in police intelligence units, captured five suspects linked to the terrorist group in the southern province of Adana and two other provinces, following an investigation by the chief prosecutor’s office in Adana. The suspects were in charge of supplying money sent from abroad to other members of the terrorist group, to finance their terror attacks as well as arson targeting the country’s forests.

Reunion

Elsewhere, it was a day of joy for Aysel Koyun as she reunited with her son Neşat. Koyun was among the mothers who staged a sit-in outside the Diyarbakır office of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The HDP, a party affiliated with the PKK, is accused of acting as a "recruitment office" for the PKK by prosecutors. Since September 2019, mothers (later joined by fathers and other members of families) continue their sit-in protest in Diyarbakır. Families demand the PKK to release their children brainwashed into fighting for the group, mainly in Iraq’s north where it has major hideouts. Carrying photos of their sons and daughters, teary-eyed families pioneered the unprecedented protest against the terrorist group that has intimidated the Kurdish population in the southeast for decades.

The Koyun family was the 44th family since 2019 to have their children back. Most families reunited with their sons or daughters as they fled the terrorist group and turned themselves in to Turkish authorities on the Iraqi-Turkish border. Aysel Koyun and her son met in a historic building now used as a museum in Diyarbakır’s Sur district, which was damaged in attacks by PKK in the past. Their reunion was closed to the press.

Aysel Koyun told Ihlas News Agency (IHA) back in 2019 when she joined the protest in Diyarbakır that her son was abducted by the PKK in 2015. "One morning, he left home without having breakfast and never came back. He was just a child. Since then, I only saw him once, in a video (released by the PKK). Then, I decided to come here. I just want my children back. If these people (at the HDP) want recruits, they can send their own children," she said.

Tragedy

Also on Friday, another family marked the anniversary of a 1987 terrorist attack by the PKK in Eruh, a district in the eastern province of Siirt where the PKK committed its first atrocities in the early 1980s. Nizamettin Baykara lost his uncle and other relatives when PKK terrorists raided Milan, a rural neighborhood in Eruh, and massacred 27 people, including infants and older children.

Baykara, then a young man, vividly remembers the massacre. "That night, all the men in the village convened in a house to watch TV. It was the only TV in the village. My father was among them. Around 9 p.m. in the evening, most people went home and were already asleep. Just then, terrorists came. There were three groups. They fired rockets and grenades at three houses," he recalled.

The village did not have any security force and the only thing to alert the police was a radio, in the residence of the village mukhtar. Baykara’s uncle was among two men manning the radio station and was killed when terrorists targeted their place first. His uncle and fellow radio watchman were armed and shot back but to no avail. A hail of bullets killed both. Baykara says houses were set on fire and people could not leave, dying among flames. "They shot at everyone, even a three-day-old baby. One of the children killed was holding his intestines torn apart by gunfire and fell down and died."

He also recalled how a man pulled his sister-in-law and her young daughter from a burning house and jumped from the roof. "The girl on his back fell and died." Two years later, again on Aug. 18, his grandfather Resul, was killed by terrorists in another village of Siirt. "I pray for all who died in 1987 and 1989," Baykara said as the villagers visited a monument erected in memory of victims.