How the PKK sustained its insurgency, from black market 1940s rifles to anti-aircraft missiles

Over decades of armed rebellion with different backers, the group has a wide array of weapons

Armed Kurdish fighters from the PKK stand at attention after arriving in the Heror area, north-east of Duhok in May 2013. AP

The leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan called on his followers to disarm, possibly ending more than four decades of insurgency against the Turkish state that has caused the deaths of about 40,000 people.

The PKK has said it could end its armed rebellion several times in the past under the right conditions.

Murat Karayilan, the head of the armed wing, once promised that “arms can be abandoned at the end of a specific process, if the Turkish state clears the way for the democratic struggle of the Kurdish nation, if it ceases to continue its policies of denial, arms may lose their meaning.”

But just where did the group get those arms, enabling it to mount such a potent insurgency for so long? Many insurgent groups like the PKK often lack sustained foreign backing and turn to crime and extortion for funds.

In the past, the PKK has received arms from Syria, Armenia and Iran, but shifting political currents have undermined those weapons transfers.

In some instances, the group has even made its own guns, like the large calibre, long range Zagros rifle. The weapon has also been used by the US-backed People's Protection Units (YPG) part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the US' main ally in the war against ISIS in Syria. The use of the gun by both groups has fuelled long-standing Turkish accusations that the YPG and PKK closely co-operate, despite US claims to the contrary.

A group of armed Kurdish fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party enter northern Iraq in the Heror area, northeast of Dahuk. The PKK came to the rescue of the persecuted Yazidi minority in 2014, but they are regarded as a terrorist group by Turkey. Ceerwan Aziz / AP

Karayilan, also known as Cemal, was designated a “Significant Foreign Narcotics Trafficker,” by the US Treasury in 2008, and subject to a $5 million bounty.

Drug running on a massive scale was one way the group could maintain a supply of arms and funding after Baathist Syria - formerly one of the group’s main backers - expelled Ocalan in 1998 under Turkish pressure, the year of his arrest and a unilaterally declared PKK ceasefire.

Weeks after the ceasefire ended, another Kurdish separatist group, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, launched a bombing campaign which would soon target tourist areas and public transport.

This was a low point for the PKK, following harsh and often bloody Turkish government crackdowns in Kurdish majority areas, widely condemned by human rights groups.

Over the years, the PKK has been able to recruit and raise funds during these periods of oppression and chaotic episodes in the region’s history, building an arsenal of weapons, often hidden in mountain hideouts, including some of the oldest guns in service.

Syria's collapse

Some of their weapons date to the Second World War or earlier, but include modern weapons, including deadly first-person view drones, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons and Russian anti-tank weapons such as the Konkurs, likely to have come from former Syrian army stocks.

SA-18 and SA-7 portable anti-aircraft systems have also been used to shoot down Turkish helicopters, almost certainly from Syrian stocks (originally purchased from Russia) or obtained during Syria’s collapse into civil war after 2011.

One 2017 Turkish raid on a major PKK weapons cache in the mountains of southern Turkey illustrates the issue well. The army said they had found “237” of the ubiquitous Kalashnikov assault rifle, 23 G-3 rifles, a Zagros rifle, several Mauser rifles and an M-16, among other weapons.

A member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) carries an automatic rifle on a road in the Qandil Mountains, the PKK headquarters in northern Iraq, on June 22, 2018. AFP

The Soviet-era Kalashnikovs are the easiest to explain, for decades the standard-issue rifle of the Syrian army with many different variants made in around 20 countries, and an estimated 100 million manufactured worldwide. But just how old are some of the PKK’s Kalashnikovs?

According to Militant Wire, a website dedicated to tracking arms, PKK fighters have recently been spotted with AK-74s from 1981, three years after the gun, a successor to the AK-47, entered service.

It’s likely that many of the Kalashnikovs used by the group are far older, if some of the other rifles are a guide. No model for the Mausers is mentioned in the Turkish statement, but the German company made the standard issue rifle for the Nazis and, after the Second World War, revived operations in the 1960s making sniper rifles, until it was purchased by Rheinmetall in 1995.

It is possible the guns found could have been Second World War era because Militant Wire notes, the PKK has used heavily modified Mosin-Nagant rifles.

The Mosin-Nagant, developed over a century ago in Russia, was widely used by the Soviet Army in the 1930s and 40s and, like the Mauser, made its way to Baathist Syria in the 1950s and 60s when Damascus was closely aligned to the Communist Bloc. Mosin-Nagants with new barrels and modern sights have often been seen in the Syrian civil war, along with other Second World War weapons likely transferred from Eastern Germany or Communist Czechoslovakia.

The G-3 rifles, made by German firm Heckler & Koch, may have been weapons made under licence by Iran, which at times has been a supporter of the PKK, backing the Iraqi Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which at times worked with the PKK. Turkey suspects Iran may still be attempting to equip the PKK, possibly supplying 358 loitering munitions, a type of missile designed to hunt down enemy helicopters and drones.

Finally, the M-16 might have been captured from Turkish forces, which over the decades have been heavily equipped with American weaponry or, might have been purchased on the black market after tens of thousands of arms supplied by the US to the Iraqi army after the 2003 US invasion disappeared.

Those included many M-16s abandoned by Iraqi forces crumbling in the face of militant insurgents or soldiers who simply left the army and sold their rifles for additional income.

This class of US-purchased weapons could extend to AT-4 anti-tank weapons, supplied to Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces during the war against ISIS, and captured from the PKK in Turkish operations.