This is the Popular Front podcast with me Jake Hanrahan.

We're focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict all across the world.

Popular Front is completely independent.

Today we're speaking to journalist Frederica Giedink. She's just been in the Kurdistan

areas in northern Iraq with the Kurdish rebels of the PKK. Recently their jail leader

Odhjalan said that the group is to disband and disarm, but what that actually means

is not quite what it sounds. Rifles were burned and statements were read, but what that actually means is not quite what it sounds.

Rifles were burned and statements were read, but there's a little bit more to all of this than meets the I.

Frederica explains it all.

We are entirely independent. Support us at patreon.com slash popular front.

We'll talk about this kind of symbolic ceremony that the PKK did recently in northern Iraq,

Kurdistan.

But let's talk about what led up to that first.

So it's a little bit confusing, I feel.

But let's kind of start.

Why is it that the PKK have now said they're disarming and they're going to disband?

Maybe let's take it back to the, you know, the video statement from Ogeland in the prison.

Yeah, I think we have to make a distinction between disarming and ending the armed struggle.

It's mainly about the latter, actually.

So it was, the PKK has been saying for many years that it wants an end to the armed struggle.

Already in 2013 they said so, but also before.

And now they're saying it again.

...