Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Öcalan is charged with treason in Ankara, Turkey.
Abdullah calan ( OH-j-lahn; Turkish: [daan]; born 4 April 1949), also known as Apo (short for both Abdullah and "uncle" in Kurdish and Turkish), is a Kurdish political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).calan was based in Syria from 1979 to 1998. He helped found the PKK in 1978, and led it into the KurdishTurkish conflict in 1984. For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the PKK until the late 1990s.
After being forced to leave Syria, calan was abducted in Nairobi in 1999 by the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) (with assistance of the USA) and taken to Turkey, where after a trial he was sentenced to death under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which concerns the formation of armed organizations. The sentence was commuted to aggravated life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty. From 1999 until 2009, he was the sole prisoner in mral prison in the Sea of Marmara, where he is still held.calan has advocated a political solution to the conflict since the 1993 Kurdistan Workers' Party ceasefire. calan's prison regime has oscillated between long periods of isolation during which he is allowed no contact with the outside world, and periods when he is permitted visits. He was also involved in negotiations with the Turkish government that led to a temporary KurdishTurkish peace process in 2013.From prison, calan has published several books. Jineology, also known as the science of women, is a form of feminism advocated by calan and subsequently a fundamental tenet of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). calan's philosophy of democratic confederalism is applied in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), an autonomous polity formed in Syria in 2012.
Kurds (Kurdish: کورد ,Kurd) or Kurdish people are an Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. There are exclaves of Kurds in Central Anatolia, Khorasan, and the Caucasus, as well as significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey (in particular Istanbul) and Western Europe (primarily in Germany). The Kurdish population is estimated to be between 30 and 45 million.Kurds speak the Kurdish languages and the Zaza–Gorani languages, which belong to the Western Iranian branch of the Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family.After World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. However, that promise was broken three years later, when the Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of modern Turkey and made no such provision, leaving Kurds with minority status in all of the new countries. Recent history of the Kurds includes numerous genocides and rebellions, along with ongoing armed conflicts in Turkish, Iranian, Syrian, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurds in Iraq and Syria have autonomous regions, while Kurdish movements continue to pursue greater cultural rights, autonomy, and independence throughout Kurdistan.