Urban Warfare in the Turkey-PKK Conflict and Beyond

From Mosul to Aleppo to Sana’a, a growing proportion of the world’s most violent conflicts are being fought in cities, and an overwhelming percentage of people killed in urban warfare are civilians. According to a recent report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, five times more civilians die in offensives carried out in cities than in other battles. The report also shows that over the past three years, wars in cities have accounted for 70% of all civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria, demonstrating what Robert Mardini, ICRC’s Regional Director for the Middle East has described as a “new scale of urban suffering…where no one and nothing is spared by the violence.”

This destructive upsurge in urban warfare is by no means constrained to the Middle East. In eastern Ukraine, state forces continue to periodically battle Russian-backed separatists in the city of Donetsk. In the Philippines, the city of Marawi was effectively levelled in the course of the recent fighting between the military and pro-ISIS insurgents. Urban warfare has also affected the capitals of the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, and Cote d’Ivoire, while urban terrorism has targeted major cities in Kenya and Nigeria.

Unfortunately, trends in global urbanization and patterns of global armed conflict suggest that future wars will increasingly be fought in urban areas, at a tremendously high cost to the civilians living there. As such, military decision-makers and humanitarian agencies are increasingly interested in gaining a better understanding of the causes, conduct, and consequences of urban warfare. In this context, as we argue in our January 2018 War on the Rocks article, the recent conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) presents a useful case study for the examination of these pressing issues.

A New Urban Chapter in a Decades-Long Rural Conflict

The conflict over Kurdish national self-determination and autonomy in Turkey has been ongoing since 1984, and has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people. In 2013, with the war at a stalemate, the Turkish government and the PKK began an unprecedented negotiations process. Non-negligible progress has been made in recognizing Kurdish cultural and language rights, but after two years of relative calm, the talks and the ceasefire collapsed in July of 2015, and the two parties were again at war.

Historically, the PKK’s center of gravity has been in the countryside, and since its formation, the group has predominantly relied on rural guerilla warfare tactics. When the negotiations process broke down in the summer of 2015, many observers of the region were therefore surprised to see that violence was spreading across the cities and towns of the majority-Kurdish south-east.

And as the fighting shifted to the urban areas, the Turkish armed forces – well trained and experienced in rural counterinsurgency and counterterrorism techniques – struggled to adapt to this new phase of the decades-long conflict.

In our article, we addressed three key questions: First, why did the PKK choose to target cities from 2015 onward? Second, what strategies and tactics did each side pursue throughout this urban phase of the conflict? Third, what are the long-term consequences of these destructive urban battles?

Overall, PKK’s ultimate goal was to instigate a mass uprising amongst Turkey’s Kurdish population and to force the government to make greater concessions on regional autonomy if negotiations resumed. By taking the fight to the cities, then, the PKK sought to undermine the government’s claim to effective authority in urban areas and to rally public support from the Kurdish minority by revealing the brutality of the regime. The two years of ceasefire and negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish government gave the group an opportunity to strengthen its presence and influence in the majority Kurdish urban districts in the country’s southeast, while a confluence of domestic and regional developments empowered the PKK politically and militarily, fueling its optimism about the potential of a mass Kurdish rebellion.

 As negotiations collapsed in July of 2015, several regional mayors in the majority Kurdish districts declared their autonomy from the Turkish state. The PKK then sought to implement what security studies scholars refer to as a strategy of “denial,” as its urban youth militia erected barricades, dug trenches, and prepared to secure and hold city neighborhoods against government incursion into these so-called autonomous areas. They adopted tactics such as booby trapping buildings, hanging sheets and drapes to defeat snipers and aerial reconnaissance, and blasting holes in house walls to allow for safe passage between buildings.

The government initially responded with “anti-terrorism operations.” Between July and November of 2015, it primarily relied on “hybrid fighting squads” made up of police special operations units, Gendarmerie special operations units, commandos, and other special operations teams, as well as armored Army units.

When these measures failed to restore order, the government’s strategy shifted to mirror traditional military doctrine for urban warfare: besiege and isolate a city before an assault to cut logistical support to the enemy inside, undercutting their capabilities and will to continue fighting. Curfews were imposed in about 30 urban districts and some rural locations throughout the southeast, closing entire residential neighborhoods for weeks and months on end.

In June of 2016, after nearly a year of fighting, the Turkish forces eventually succeeded in dislodging the PKK from the cities. But this so-called victory came at a great price. Turkey’s heavy-handed approach led to great destruction in cities, mass displacement, growing resentment among the Kurdish population, and international condemnation.

At the same time, the urban phase of the conflict was also not a success story for the PKK. Not only did the group fail to inspire a large-scale Kurdish rebellion, fighting in the cities cost the PKK significant local support. In the long term, however, the destruction in the cities may strengthen the PKK’s strategic narrative of a conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish people as a whole.

Broader Implications

Looking at how the PKK managed to expand its influence in the cities of Turkey’s southeast before July 2015, it is clear that armed groups are learning to exploit popular discontent and weak governance to establish their presence in urban areas, which have traditionally been considered to be the government’s strongholds. Despite generally being much weaker than the armed forces of the states they face, armed groups have repeatedly proven they can survive and even win by blending into the civilian population and utilizing the city’s complex physical terrain to their advantage.

They hide and move undetected through subterranean tunnels and underground sewer systems to ambush and attack the less-mobile government forces, as Hamas has done in Gaza against the Israel Defense Forces, or place snipers on roofs, upper floors of buildings, and trenches as the Chechens did against the Russian Army in Grozny. This is partly why victory in urban warfare can be exceptionally costly, in terms of both military and civilian casualties, as state militaries resort to destroying cities in an effort to regain control of the contested areas.

Moreover, it appears that this experience and knowledge of urban warfare tactics is being shared between different armed groups with similar political goals or a shared ethnic background. Reports of ISIS-linked militants in the Philippines using urban combat tactics seen in the Middle East shows this diffusion of knowledge is happening on a global scale.

Another takeaway is that the ‘war of narratives’ can be as fiercely contested as the battle on the ground. As the fighting unfolded, the Turkish government and the PKK each peddled their own version of the truth about the civilian death toll, the legality (and morality) of the weapons and tactics employed, and who was to blame for this destructive war in the cities. That fighting in cities attracts far more media attention and subsequent public scrutiny than atrocities in the countryside is something that the Americans learned the hard way nearly 40 years ago during the Battle of Hue, in one of the most gruesome episodes of the Vietnam War. Today, however, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are making it even more difficult for states to control the information environment during military operations, and in turn, to shape public perceptions in their favor.

For advanced state militaries like those of the United States, UK, Israel, and Turkey, there are several lessons here. First, when it comes to fighting in cities, superior conventional capabilities do not necessarily translate into effectiveness in battle. Indeed, while urban insurgencies have traditionally been the easiest kind to defeat, recent examples suggest this may no longer be the case. As such, a higher premium should be placed on training and equipment specifically for urban warfare.

Second, negative media coverage—especially reports of high civilian casualties—can erode domestic and international support for the military campaign. Therefore, commanders operating in cities and urban warfare training must pay close attention to procedures for protecting civilians and minimizing damage to civilian infrastructure in urban battle zones.

Margarita Konaev is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Burak Kadercan is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy at the United States Naval War College and Inaugural Resident Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.