Kurdish conference takes place in Moscow

MOSCOW

Representatives of Kurdish groups across the Middle East have met in Moscow on Feb. 15 to attend a conference on Kurds and their future. 

Asya Abdullah, the co-chair of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and Anwar Muslim, the chairman of the Kobane canton inside Syria, attended the conference on the Middle East, along with other representatives of Kurdish groups in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. 

People’s Democratic Party (HDP) lawmakers from Turkey’s Şanlıurfa province, Osman Baydemir and Dilek Öcalan, also attended the meeting, during which they shared their views over the current status of Kurds and how to tackle the problems they face. 

Baydemir was a former mayor of Diyarbakır. 

The conference was held on the 18th anniversary of the capture of the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, by Turkish special forces in Kenya. 

Öcalan is serving a life sentence at a prison on İmrali island in the Marmara Sea. 

Turkish forces have been engaged in armed clashes with the PKK since the mid-1980s, though there was a more than two-year hiatus in fighting thanks to a resolution process until the summer of 2015, when the sides returned to armed clashes.

Turkey opposes the idea of PYD and its military wing, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG), to gain ground and become stronger along its border in Syria as it designates the PYD and YPG as terrorist organizations due to their links to the PKK. 

Answering a question if she had knowledge about the conference, state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova as saying on Feb. 15 that she had no knowledge of the conference and that no representative of the ministry would attend it.