For more than 40 years, Turkey has fought armed rebellions by the Kurdistan Workers' Party or the PKK, an extremist group seeking greater rights for the country's Kurdish minority.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in decades of conflict, both in PKK attacks on military and civilian targets and in Turkish military operations against extremists and the communities that harbor them. Türkiye, the US and other countries view the group as a terrorist organization.
Now, the group's imprisoned founder, Abdullah Okaran, calls on Kurdish fighters to lay their arms, they have A ceasefire has been declared. However, it is still unclear whether the 40-year conflict will end, and what the Turkish government will end.
Here's what you need to know about the conflict between the PKK and Türkiye:
Who is PKK?
The group began fighting the Turkish state in the early 1980s and is seeking independence for Kurdish people, originally thought to make up more than 15% of the Turkish population.
PKK fighters, beginning in mountains in eastern and southern Turkey, attacked Turkish military bases and police stations, spurring government responses. The conflict then spread to other parts of the country, with devastating PKK bombings in Turkish cities that killed many civilians.
Over the past decade, Turkish forces have routed PKK troops from major Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey, using drones to kill leaders and fighter jets, hindering their ability to organize and execute attacks.
The conflict has been boiling for years, though occasional PKK attacks have revived the fear of wider conflict. Last year, the small extremist forces plunged into the headquarters of a national aerospace company armed with rifles and explosives, killing five employees before security forces regained control.
Who is Abdullah Okaran?
Okaran is the founder and leader of the PKK, which is fighting the Turkish state. He was in a Turkish prison for a quarter of a century.
Many Turkish Kurds see Okaran as a powerful symbol of the struggle for Kurdish rights. And despite his imprisonment, he still has great influence on the PKKs in Syria, Iraq and Iran and its associated militias.
Okaran established the PKK with other rebel groups in the late 1970s and ran the organization primarily from nearby Syria as it launched attacks in southeastern Turkey and later major Turkey cities.
In 1998, Syria drove him out, and he captured him on a plane at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya on February 15, 1999.
After being captured in 1999, he was imprisoned on Imrari Island in the Marmara Sea, south of Istanbul, and was the only prisoner for many years.
That same year, Turkey convicted him and sentenced him to death. The sentence was appointed to life sentence after Turkey abolished the death penalty as part of his bid to join the European Union.
Since his incarceration, Okaran has separated his ideology from withdrawal to Kurdish rights within Türkiye.
How does Turkey see Mr. Okaran?
For most Turks, Okaran remains the most hated terrorist in the country.
Human rights groups criticized the isolation on Imurali Island. In 2009, five other prisoners were sent to the facility and Mr. Okaran was allowed to meet them several times a week, according to reports in Turkish media.
However, in recent years, Ocaran and other inmates on the island have not been permitted to visitors, including calls with lawyers and family members.
Last October, President Receptacle Tayip Erdogan's powerful political allies made a surprising public appeal to Mr. Ocaran and asked him to tell the fighters to lay their arms on them to end the conflict.
It led to limited visits from Okaran's relatives and political allies to explore the possibilities of a new peace process between Turkey and the PKK.
Who are the Kurds?
The Kurds are an ethnic group of around 40 million people, with a large difference in estimates concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye.
They speak multiple dialects of the Kurdish people, a language that is not directly related to Turkish or Arabic. Most are Sunni Muslims.
The Kurds were promised their nation by the world powers after World War I, but this was never recognized. Over the next generation, there have been Kurdish revolts in various countries, and Kurds face state restraints of their language and culture.
In Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian democratic army, whose leaders have PKK roots and follow Okaran's ideology, controls the country's northeastern part of the country. They have been supported by the United States for years and played a key role in beating the Islamic state.
However, the collapse of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December has made their future status unclear. They are in conflict with Syrian Arab rebels supported by Turkey, taking control of Damascus's new Syrian government.
Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq's predominantly Kurdish northern regions have been semi-autonomous. The PKK leadership is currently based in the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq. In recent years, Turkey has attacked Iraqi and Syrian groups and associated militias and lobbyed the Iraqi government to expel them.
How did previous peace efforts take place?
Several efforts have been made to freeze or end the turkey-PKK conflict, starting with the 1993 ceasefire. But they all fell apart, often leading to greater bloodshed.
Violence erupted until new peace negotiations began in 2011. At the time, Turkish intelligence agents met with Okaran in prison, planning to disarm the fighters, and Kurdish politicians discovered a message between him and his fellow Iraqi peers.
However, this process collapsed in mid-2015, with each side denounced each other for their obstacles. According to the International Crisis Group, one of the most deadly stages of the conflict follows, with urban battles in cities in the southeastern Turkey.
Is it different this time?
Turkey still considers the PKK a separatist terrorist group that does not represent the Kurdish people, but has acknowledged historical violations of Kurdish rights and expanded the Kurdish language and culture margins.
Kurdish television and radio broadcasting were approved, and some schools allowed Kurdish as an elective course.
But at the same time, the government has removed more than 150 elected Kurdish mayors from their posts since 2015.
Most of the mayors who were taken were accused of crimes related to the PKK and were found guilty of some
Human Rights Watch has called for the removal of the politically motivated Kurdish mayor and the violation of voter rights.
