A Kurdish militant group that has waged a long-running insurgency in Turkey announced Thursday its fighters in northern Iraq will begin handing over their weapons, marking the first concrete step toward disarmament as part of a peace process.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, announced in May it would disband and renounce armed conflict, ending four decades of hostilities. The move came after PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been imprisoned on an island near Istanbul since 1999, urged his group in February to convene a congress and formally disband and disarm.
