Turkish authorities on Saturday arrested 17 suspects linked to the terrorist group PKK, including five members of the pro-PKK Green Left Party (YSP).
Nazlı Binici, the head of YSP’s Suruç branch, as well as four other Suruç city council members belonging to YSP, a doctor and a teacher, were among the 17 suspects detained in raids across three districts of southeastern Şanlıurfa province last Wednesday.
The suspects were accused of operating as two separate groups within the PKK, with one surveilling and reporting on police stations and security checkpoints while the other was preparing for assassination against security forces under direct orders from so-called top members of the terrorist group, authorities said.
The YSP is informally known as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) and is a successor of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The party rebranded as YSP after last year’s May elections to skirt a Constitutional Court lawsuit seeking its permanent closure over alleged links to the PKK. It later tried to change its name to the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (Dem Party), but the courts rejected the request.
Dozens of HDP members, including branch chairs, have been previously arrested over their ties to the terror group in recent years. The now-obsolete HDP’s former chair, Selahattin Demirtaş himself, has been in prison since 2016 for spreading terrorist propaganda and having ties to the PKK and retired from active politics last June.
The PKK is recognized as a terrorist group in Türkiye, as well as in the European Union and the United States. Its bloody insurgency starting in the 1980s has left over 40,000 people dead in the country.
Members of the PKK and other organizations like Daesh rely on a network of members and supporters in Türkiye. In response, Ankara has been intensifying its crackdown on the terrorists and their links at home, conducting pinpoint operations and freezing assets to eliminate the roots of the terrorist groups.
Similarly, on Sunday, the Defense Ministry announced that 11 more PKK terrorists were eliminated in airstrikes in northern Iraq, where the PKK has hideouts and a stronghold in the Qandil Mountains near the Turkish border.
In its weekly briefing on Thursday, it said a total of 519 terrorists have been eliminated since Jan. 1, including 204 in northern Iraq and 315 in northern Syria, where Türkiye is battling the PKK’s Syrian offshoot, the YPG.
