Turkey’s conflict history dates back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the post–World War I period, when Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought the War of Independence (1919–1923) against occupying Allied and Greek forces and the remnants of the Ottoman regime. Since the founding of the Republic in 1923, most major conflicts have been internal or regional: repeated military coups and interventions in politics, long-running violence between the state and Kurdish movements (especially the PKK) from the 1980s onward, and cross‑border operations in neighboring Syria and Iraq linked to Kurdish militias and wider regional instability.
In 2025, conflict in Turkey fell to minimal levels, with only limited clashes involving the PKK and the Islamic State (IS). UCDP recorded 11 battle-related deaths, including 1 civilian.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Turkey’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Turkey occupies the Anatolian peninsula, a compact, mountainous landmass bridging southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, with a small European foothold, Thrace, across the Bosphorus and Dardanelles — two narrow straits that form the only sea passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Some 85 million people live within borders drawn after the First World War, the overwhelming majority Sunni Muslim, with a Kurdish minority concentrated in the southeast and smaller Alevi (a heterodox Muslim community whose practice differs sharply from Sunni orthodoxy), Arab, and other communities scattered elsewhere. Mainstream historians read modern Turkey as the successor project to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire, an Islamic monarchy that once ruled from the gates of Vienna to the Arabian peninsula and collapsed after defeat in the First World War. Out of that collapse, Mustafa Kemal — later given the surname Atatürk, “Father of the Turks” — led a military and diplomatic campaign that secured an independent, ethnically compacted state and then remade it as a secular, Western-facing republic. The consensus narrative traces a single line from that founding, through single-party rule, a hesitant transition to multiparty democracy, repeated military interventions, and the more recent ascendancy of religiously conservative politics, as an ongoing negotiation of how Western, how Muslim, and how centralized the state should be.
Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (2004)
Five thresholds mark the accepted turning points. Ottoman defeat in the First World War (1918) triggered occupation by Allied and Greek forces and the punitive Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which would have dismembered Anatolia entirely — the shock that made resistance possible. The War of Independence (1919–1923), fought against occupying Greek and Allied forces, secured a defensible, ethnically compact homeland and produced the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), still Turkey’s founding international document. The abolition of the sultanate and then the caliphate (1922–1924) — the Ottoman sultan’s role as spiritual head of Sunni Islam worldwide — severed the new state from religious monarchy and cleared the ground for a rapid secularizing program: a new Swiss-derived civil code, a Latin alphabet, and the vote for women years ahead of much of Europe. The transition to competitive multiparty elections (1950) broke three decades of single-party rule and let long-suppressed rural and religious constituencies into politics for the first time. And the attempted coup of July 2016, followed by mass purges and a referendum concentrating power in an executive presidency, marks the point at which the military’s historic role as guardian of secular order was finally broken. Each threshold changed not just who governed but what kind of authority — religious, military, electoral — could claim legitimacy.
Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (1993)
In the consensus account, the Turkish state preceded the Turkish nation, and built it deliberately. The republic proclaimed in 1923 inherited the bureaucratic and military apparatus of the Ottoman Empire, an institution centuries old, but not a citizenry that thought of itself primarily as “Turkish” — Ottoman subjects had identified chiefly by religion, region, or dynasty. Ankara’s new government used the tools of the state itself — a national school curriculum, compulsory Turkish-language instruction, a Latin alphabet redesigned specifically to break continuity with Ottoman Arabic script, conscription, and an official historiography crediting Turks with a deep and glorious past — to manufacture a shared national identity where none had uniformly existed. Citizenship law defined the nation in civic-territorial terms, as all inhabitants of the new borders, even as policy in practice favored Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims. This is treated as a textbook case of state-first nationalism: the binding agent was not a preexisting ethnic community demanding its own state, as in much nineteenth-century European nationalism, but a state elite using education, language policy, and law to construct the nation it needed to govern securely. The order of operations — state, then nation — is treated as settled by nearly all standard accounts.
Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (2010)
If one force best explains Turkey’s trajectory across two centuries, mainstream historians point to sustained, state-directed modernization pursued under conditions of external pressure — reform imposed from above by a narrow governing elite anxious to preserve the state’s independence against stronger powers. The pattern begins well before the republic, in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Tanzimat (“reorganization”) reforms that rebuilt law, taxation, and the army on European models to fend off European encroachment, and continues through Kemalist secularization, mid-century industrial planning, and the market liberalization of the 1980s. In each phase, a comparatively small governing class — reforming bureaucrats, army officers, or technocrats — has driven change faster than society at large was ready to absorb, provoking recurring backlash from more traditional, rural, or religious constituencies, followed by periods of accommodation. This oscillation between elite-driven modernization and popular reassertion, rather than any single ideology, is what consensus historians treat as the throughline: it explains the republic’s rhythm of reform, resistance, military correction, and renewed reform, and why the question of how Western Turkey should be has remained live in nearly every decade since the Tanzimat began.
Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (2004)
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A body of revisionist scholarship, often grouped under a “continuity thesis,” argues that the republic’s founding story of a clean break from the Ottoman past obscures more than it reveals. On this reading, the same governing network — many of them former officers and officials of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the secretive movement that had run the late Ottoman state and organized the wartime deportations and killings of Ottoman Armenians — carried its personnel, methods, and much of its nationalist program directly into the new republic under different labels. What is remembered as a wholly new secular nation was, on this account, substantially staffed and shaped by people formed under the old order, with Atatürk’s movement drawing on CUP networks for organization and cadres rather than emerging from nothing. Mainstream historians do not dispute the personnel overlap, which is documented, but they dispute the weight the continuity thesis places on it: they point to genuine institutional ruptures — abolition of the caliphate, a wholly new legal and alphabetic order, disestablishment of Islam — that a personnel-based reading tends to underplay. The disagreement is not about whether continuity existed, but about whether it was decisive or secondary to real, structural change.
Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building (2010)
Revisionist historians reweight the founding decade’s thresholds around demographic engineering rather than heroic liberation alone. The years remembered as the War of Independence (1919–1923) also encompassed the final, most lethal phase of violence against Ottoman Armenians and the compulsory Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, which uprooted roughly 1.5 million Orthodox Christians from Anatolia and half a million Muslims from Greece under an agreement signed alongside the peace treaty that founded the republic. In this reading, Anatolia was not simply liberated but demographically remade — its Christian communities, present for millennia, reduced within a decade to a small fraction of the population — and that remaking, not military victory alone, was what allowed a homogeneous nation-state to be built at all. Mainstream historians accept the genocide and the expulsions as established fact but resist treating them as the sole engine of the founding period, arguing that a real anti-imperial resistance against occupying Greek and Allied forces was also underway, and that the two processes, though overlapping in time, had distinct causes — one a defensive war, the other a policy of ethnic and religious homogenization pursued by the same wartime and post-war authorities. The dispute is over proportion and causation, not over whether the events occurred.
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity (2012)
Where consensus scholarship describes a state that built a nation through schools and law, revisionist historians argue the more accurate description is a state that manufactured a nation by first subtracting its non-Turkish, non-Muslim populations. Anatolia in 1914 was a strikingly plural region — significant Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Jewish communities alongside Turkish and other Muslim groups. By 1927, the Armenian and Greek Orthodox populations had been killed, deported, or exchanged in numbers reducing them to a small remainder, and the Kurdish population, though large and geographically concentrated, was subjected in the following decades to forced resettlement and suppression of language and identity in the name of a single Turkish nation. On this account, the “nation” the republic then educated citizens into was not a neutral civic category but the residue left after violent subtraction, and the state’s subsequent nation-building apparatus consolidated a homogeneity that coercion, not persuasion, had already produced. Mainstream historians agree the diversity loss was real and substantially deliberate, particularly regarding Armenians, but caution against reading the entire process as one coordinated design, noting the contributions of wartime chaos, local initiative, and later, distinct Kurdish-policy decisions made for different reasons than the earlier violence against Christians.
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity (2012)
If mainstream history treats state-directed modernization as Turkey’s defining long-run force, revisionist historians propose a different candidate: the sustained production and enforcement of ethnic and religious homogeneity, beginning in the last Ottoman decade and continuing, in altered form, into the republic’s treatment of its Kurdish population across the twentieth century. On this reading, the deportations and killings of Armenians during the First World War, the compulsory population exchange with Greece, and later decades of assimilationist pressure and periodic armed conflict in Kurdish-majority provinces are not separate episodes but a single sustained narrowing of who could count as fully belonging to the nation, with the state as the consistent author of that narrowing across changes of regime and ideology. This account is offered as an explanation for why questions of minority recognition have never fully settled even a century after the republic’s founding. Mainstream historians grant that coercive homogenization occurred repeatedly but resist collapsing a century of otherwise different policies — imperial wartime violence, republican nation-building, and a distinct twentieth-century counter-insurgency against Kurdish militancy — into one continuous force, arguing each episode had its own immediate causes.
Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building (2010)
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Viewed through collective identity and belief, Turkey’s story is the long, unresolved negotiation between a Sunni Muslim social majority and a state that, for most of the republic’s history, has insisted on laiklik — a specifically Turkish form of secularism that does not merely separate religion from government, as in some Western usages, but places religious institutions under direct state supervision. The population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but not uniformly so in practice: alongside Sunni orthodoxy sits a substantial Alevi minority, whose devotional practice and communal worship differ sharply from mosque-centered Sunni Islam, and a Kurdish population for whom ethnic and religious identity intersect in complicated ways. Turkish national identity, as lived and described by Turks themselves, has long carried a double inheritance — Ottoman-Islamic civilization on one side, a self-consciously Western-facing republican culture on the other — and successive governments have swung between celebrating and suppressing the first in favor of the second. Public rhetoric, from Atatürk’s calls to reach “the level of contemporary civilization” to more recent invocations of Ottoman and Islamic heritage in political speech, tracks this same axis. Read this way, Turkey is less a settled national culture than an ongoing argument, conducted through ritual, dress, education, and political language, over which inheritance defines it.
Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (1964)
Cultural and political historians mark different turning points than institutional ones, tracing shifts in what could be said and worn in public. The nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms first introduced the idea that Ottoman subjects, whatever their religion, might hold equal legal standing — a principle that unsettled a social order long organized around religious hierarchy. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and the Hat Law of 1925, which banned the fez and mandated Western headwear, were read by contemporaries not as bureaucratic housekeeping but as an assault on visible Islamic identity, and provoked real popular resistance. The multiparty elections of 1950 allowed religiously conservative rural constituencies, long excluded from single-party rule, to express themselves politically for the first time, restoring mosque construction and religious education to public life. The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2002 marked a further threshold: a movement rooted in political Islam winning power through the ballot box and, over two decades, reshaping education, media, and public symbolism around a more religiously confident national self-image. Each threshold, in this lens, is a renegotiation of the same underlying question — how visibly Islamic public life in Turkey is permitted to be — rather than a step in a single linear modernization story.
M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (2003)
Culturally, Turkish national identity was bound together less by law than by a constructed sense of shared civilization — language, historical memory, and, despite the republic’s official secularism, an underlying Sunni Muslim commonality that the state’s own citizenship practice quietly assumed even as its constitution proclaimed neutrality. Kemalist nationalism defined the nation in civic, secular terms, yet in practice non-Muslim citizens found themselves treated as permanent outsiders to full national belonging regardless of language or loyalty, while Muslim Kurds, whatever their distinct language, were classified simply as Turks. From the 1970s onward, an alternative formula gained ground within the state and conservative politics alike: the “Turkish-Islamic synthesis,” which explicitly fused ethnic Turkish identity with Sunni Islam as the glue of nationhood, treating the two as inseparable rather than as the distinct categories earlier secular doctrine insisted on. This lens holds that the nation was never purely civic, as founding rhetoric claimed, nor purely religious, but a shifting compound of language, faith, and historical narrative that the state alternately downplayed and openly embraced depending on the political needs of the moment — with religion, even when officially sidelined, never fully absent from what “being Turkish” was understood to mean.
Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (2010)
The long-term force best explaining Turkey through this lens is the recurring contest between a secularizing state elite and a persistently religious, conservative society that state power could suppress but never fully remake. From the Tanzimat reformers’ cautious accommodations with Islamic law, through Kemalism’s more forceful disestablishment, and on to the religiously inflected populism of the twenty-first century, the same underlying tension resurfaces: a governing class convinced that visible religiosity is an obstacle to national strength, confronting a broader public — particularly in Anatolia’s towns and countryside — for whom Islam remains a primary source of identity, moral order, and political loyalty. Each side has, at different moments, held the upper hand, but neither has settled the question permanently; secularist retrenchments have provoked religious revivals, and religious-conservative governments have in turn provoked secularist anxiety and periodic backlash. This lens treats the pendulum itself, rather than either pole, as the defining process — the recurring, unresolved argument over how Islamic a modern Turkish public life is permitted to be, replayed in dress codes, education curricula, headscarf bans and their reversal, and electoral politics across an entire century.
Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (1964)
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Turkey occupies the Anatolian peninsula, a rugged plateau bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Aegean and Mediterranean to the west and south, and the Caucasus and Mesopotamian lowlands to the east — terrain that has always made the region a corridor rather than a cul-de-sac. At its northwestern corner sit the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, narrow straits that form the sole maritime link between the landlocked Black Sea and the open Mediterranean, giving whoever controls them leverage over Russian and Ukrainian grain and, later, oil exports. Read through geography and trade rather than politics, Turkey’s history is the story of a land bridge whose value to outside powers, as a market, a transit route, and a strategic chokepoint, has repeatedly outweighed its own resource wealth, which is comparatively modest. The late Ottoman economy was integrated into European markets as a supplier of raw agricultural goods and a buyer of manufactured imports, on terms set largely by foreign creditors and treaties; the republic then pursued decades of state-led industrialization to escape that dependency, before liberalizing outward again from the 1980s. Population, agriculture, and trade routes, more than ideology, have set the boundaries within which Turkish governments of every stripe have had to operate.
Şevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820 (2018)
Economic historians mark thresholds where trade terms, land, and labor shifted, rather than where regimes changed. An 1838 free-trade treaty with Britain, extended to other powers, locked the Ottoman Empire into low tariffs that favored European manufactured imports over local industry, a structural disadvantage that persisted for decades and helped drive the empire into mounting foreign debt and eventual default in 1875. The Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, agreed alongside the peace settlement that founded the republic, redistributed the property, workshops, and farmland of departing Orthodox Christians to incoming Muslim populations and the state, reshaping ownership patterns across western Anatolia’s towns almost overnight. The étatist program of the 1930s, a response to the collapse of world trade during the Great Depression, had the state itself build banks, railways, and factories where private capital was scarce, creating an industrial base largely absent before. And the liberalization begun in 1980 under finance minister Turgut Özal dismantled decades of import controls, opened the economy to export markets and foreign capital, and set the pattern — construction- and export-led growth, financed by foreign borrowing — that has shaped the economy since. Each threshold reordered who owned productive assets and on what terms Turkey traded with the outside world.
Şevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820 (2018)
Economic historians describe the republic’s nation-building as inseparable from a redistribution of property. When the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the earlier destruction of the Armenian commercial and artisan class emptied out a substantial share of Anatolia’s merchants, craftsmen, and landowners, the resulting vacancy in shops, workshops, and farmland was filled, largely by state design, with Muslim Turkish owners — creating, in a single generation, a Turkish-Muslim propertied and merchant class where a more religiously and ethnically mixed one had stood before. This transfer mattered as much to national formation as any school curriculum: a nation bound together partly by law and language was also bound together by a newly common economic stake, a class of small owners with a direct material interest in the new state’s survival. Later state-led industrialization under one-party rule extended the same logic, building a state-dependent industrial and bureaucratic class loyal to Ankara. Where cultural and consensus accounts stress ideas and institutions, this lens argues that who ended up owning Turkey’s productive land and businesses, and why, did as much to fuse people to state as any constitution — property, not only citizenship law, made the new national community durable.
Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey (1987)
The single force best explaining Turkey’s long-run development, in this lens, is its position astride major trade and strategic transit routes — a location valuable enough to draw sustained outside interest and pressure, and central enough to shape internal decisions accordingly. Control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles has repeatedly made Anatolia’s fate a matter of concern to distant powers, from nineteenth-century Russian and British rivalry over access to the Black Sea, to Cold War calculations that placed Turkey inside NATO as the alliance’s southeastern anchor, to Turkey’s more recent role as a transit corridor for oil, gas, and migration between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. This geography has cut both ways: it has drawn investment, trade, and alliance benefits, but it has also meant that Anatolia was repeatedly a battleground and bargaining chip in conflicts not primarily its own, from the partition plans that followed the First World War to present-day pressures from wars along its southern border. Economic historians argue that this combination of a comparatively modest domestic resource base and an outsized strategic location, rather than any ideology, best accounts for why Turkish governments across a century have consistently prioritized straddling East and West rather than committing fully to either.
Reşat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (1988)
This is not a fifth lens — it is a map of where the four accounts above genuinely disagree, so a reader can see the disagreement rather than mistake any single lens for settled fact.
The sharpest dispute is over causation in the republic’s founding decade. Scholarly consensus and the cultural lens both largely accept the founding narrative of a defensive war of liberation followed by top-down secular modernization, differing mainly in emphasis. Revisionist scholarship does not deny that a war of liberation occurred, but argues that placing it at the center of the story understates how much of the founding also depended on the coercive removal of Armenian, Greek, and other non-Muslim communities from Anatolia, and disputes whether the resulting homogeneity should be read as an unfortunate byproduct or as a substantial part of what made the new nation-state governable at all.
A single event illustrates the split most clearly: the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Consensus and economic accounts tend to treat it as a difficult but negotiated diplomatic settlement, agreed by treaty, that resolved decades of intercommunal tension and cleared the way for stable state-building; the economic lens further reads it as a redistribution that created the propertied base of the new nation. Revisionist and cultural accounts read the same event as compulsory and traumatic mass displacement — roughly 1.5 million Orthodox Christians uprooted from land their communities had held for centuries — arguing that calling it a negotiated settlement understates the absence of consent from the people actually moved.
All four lenses agree that the republic’s founders deliberately built a new nation using the tools of the state — language policy, education, law — rather than inheriting an already-unified nation waiting for independence; none contests that fact. They part company over why that state-building was possible in the first place, and over how much weight to give coercion and demographic engineering, rather than voluntary modernization, in explaining it. They also part over what best explains Turkey’s trajectory since: elite-driven reform and its backlash (consensus), continuing ethnic and religious homogenization (revisionist), the unresolved secular–religious contest (cultural), or Anatolia’s enduring strategic value to outside powers (economic). None of these should be read as displacing the others; each foregrounds evidence the others treat as secondary.
Reference status: all sixteen citations above were verified prior to publication against publisher, library, or peer-reviewed listing records confirming author, title, year, and argument. No contested or fringe thesis is presented here as settled; the continuity thesis (Zürcher) and the demographic-engineering reading of national formation (Akçam) are identified above as positions argued by named scholars and disputed by others, not as established consensus.
As of August 2026, the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an armed group that fought Turkish security forces for over four decades in pursuit of greater Kurdish autonomy, and is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union — is in its most serious de-escalation to date, though the process remains unresolved. Imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan called publicly in February 2025 for the group to disband and disarm; the PKK announced its own dissolution and an end to armed struggle that May, and a ceasefire has broadly held since. In August 2026, Turkey’s parliament passed a legal framework, widely reported as a disarmament and reintegration law, intended to give departing militants a route back into civilian life. Independent observers and Kurdish politicians have welcomed the legislation as historic while cautioning that it addresses disarmament and amnesty-like measures more than the broader political demands — Kurdish-language rights, local governance, and the status of jailed Kurdish politicians — that originally fueled the conflict. Whether this process produces a durable political settlement, or stalls as earlier peace efforts (notably 2013–2015) did, remains an open question.
Verified via reporting from Balkan Insight, Al-Monitor, France 24, and CNN, as of August 20, 2026.
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According to UCDP, the main roots of Turkey’s internal violence lie in the armed struggle launched by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1984. The PKK initially aimed to create an independent socialist Kurdish state, later narrowing its demand to greater autonomy for Kurds in 1999. Violence peaked in the 1990s. Peace talks began in 2012, but a ceasefire broke down in 2015.
In 2024, UCDP reports that almost all state-based violence involved the Turkish Government and the PKK. Many incidents happened across the border in northern Iraq, alongside some in southeastern Turkey. A major dynamic has been Turkish airstrikes against PKK positions, including around the “Operation Claw-Lock” area named after a 2022 campaign. Turkey has also carried out repeated operations in northern Syria, first against IS and later against the SDF.
Organized violence has declined since Turkey’s first northern Syria intervention ended in 2017, and UCDP estimates 2024 fatalities fell to their lowest level since the 2015 collapse of the peace process. One-sided violence (attacks on civilians by an organized actor) remained low, with one deadly IS attack and one lethal PKK strike. The conflict still matters because it regularly crosses into Iraq and connects to wider wars in Syria.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Turkey hosts one of the world’s largest refugee populations, including millions of Syrians and smaller but significant numbers from Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This influx strains public services, feeds economic grievances amid high inflation, and has become a central issue in domestic politics, pushing Ankara toward stricter border controls and voluntary-return schemes. Externally, Turkey uses migration management as leverage with the European Union, trading cooperation on border security for financial support, customs union updates, and visa discussions. In the wider region, Ankara presents itself as a humanitarian actor but also seeks safe zones and influence in northern Syria partly to manage refugee flows and security threats along its borders.Sources: Turkish MFA [1]; MEI backgrounder on Turkish foreign policy [8]; IEMed analysis on Turkey’s geopolitical role [7]
Turkey condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supports Kyiv’s territorial integrity, and has supplied Bayraktar TB2 drones and other defense cooperation, while maintaining open channels with Moscow. Ankara invoked the Montreux Convention to restrict warship access to the Black Sea, hosted early Russia–Ukraine talks, and helped broker the Black Sea grain deal to keep Ukrainian exports flowing. However, it has not joined Western sanctions on Russia, reflecting energy dependence, trade ties, and a deliberate strategy of “strategic ambiguity” and mediation. This dual-track approach seeks to preserve NATO cohesion, protect Turkish economic interests, and maximize Ankara’s role as an indispensable interlocutor between Russia, Ukraine, and the West.Sources: CSIS on strategic ambiguity [5]; IEMed analysis on Turkey and the war in Ukraine [7]; CFR overview of Turkey’s foreign policy ambitions [2]
Turkey is a long-standing NATO member with a large military, hosting key alliance assets and set to host the 2026 NATO Summit, underscoring its centrality to European and Black Sea security. At the same time, Ankara pursues “independent and national” or “strategic autonomy” policies, including energy and defense ties with Russia, outreach to China, and activism across the Middle East, Caucasus, and Africa. This balancing often creates friction with Western partners over issues like Syria, defense procurement, and human rights, yet Turkey remains anchored to Western institutions for security and economic reasons. Ankara leverages its geography and NATO role to act as a mediator and pivotal middle power in US–Russia–China rivalry.Sources: Turkish MFA foreign policy synopsis [1]; CSIS on Erdoğan’s strategic autonomy [5]; Atlantic Council discussion of Turkey’s evolving role [3]
Turkey’s conflict history begins with the final years of the Ottoman Empire, when imperial collapse, the demands of the First World War, and the 1915 Armenian Genocide gave way to Allied occupation and the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which threatened to partition Anatolia entirely. The central process shaping modern Turkey was Kemalist nation-building: the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923) expelled occupying forces and replaced the multiethnic Ottoman sultanate with a secular, centralized republic built around a singular Turkish identity. Turkey’s greatest influence on regional history followed directly from that transformation, as the first Muslim-majority state to institutionalize secular republicanism became a contested model for governance debates across the twentieth-century Middle East. This legacy’s limits were exposed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party insurgency, continuing since 1984: the founding settlement’s homogenizing vision of Turkish identity left Kurdish grievances unresolved, producing decades of conflict within the republic it created.
Armed conflict in Turkey fell to minimal levels in 2025 as the PKK advanced a peace process announced that year — including a symbolic disarmament ceremony and its own declared dissolution — following four decades of insurgency against the Turkish state. Separately, Turkish security forces continued limited operations against remaining Islamic State (IS) cells, a distinct and unrelated front according to UCDP data.
With the PKK’s armed campaign winding down and IS activity reduced to scattered cells, UCDP recorded only a small number of battle-related deaths in Turkey in 2025, including a single civilian death. The low civilian toll reflects both the PKK’s shift away from armed activity and the reduced operational reach of IS within Turkish territory according to UCDP data.
Sources: UCDP data.
Turkish state security forces continued limited operations against both the PKK and Islamic State cells in 2025, though the PKK front sharply de-escalated as its 2025 peace process and declared dissolution advanced.
The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fought Turkish forces for four decades before announcing a peace process and its own dissolution in 2025, including a symbolic disarmament ceremony; residual clashes were minimal for the year.
Islamic State cells operating in Turkey carried out sporadic, low-intensity attacks in 2025, distinct from and unrelated to the Turkish state's parallel de-escalation with the PKK.
Turkey's 2025 conflict landscape reflected two separate and diverging fronts: a four-decade insurgency by the PKK moving rapidly toward resolution through a formal peace process, and a continuing but much smaller counter-terrorism front against residual Islamic State cells.
Turkey moves from one‑party rule to competitive elections, culminating in the Democrat Party’s 1950 victory. This shift entrenches electoral politics and civilian–military tension, a backdrop for later coups and for how Ankara manages security threats, including Kurdish movements and regional conflicts.
Turkey enters NATO, anchoring its security in the Western alliance and hosting key bases. This alignment shapes its role in the Cold War, later counterterrorism and Syria policy, and conditions international reactions to Ankara’s campaigns against the PKK and Islamic State.
The army overthrows the Democrat Party government, citing instability. A 1961 constitution introduces stronger checks but preserves the military’s political role, enabling future interventions and shaping how the state confronts dissent, including Kurdish activism and leftist movements in later decades.
Turkey intervenes in Cyprus after a Greek‑backed coup, occupying the island’s north. The crisis strains ties with NATO allies and heightens the military’s prestige, reinforcing a security‑first mindset that later influences approaches to Kurdish insurgency and cross‑border operations into neighboring states.
The military seizes power amid political violence. The 1982 constitution strengthens centralized authority, bans many parties, and restricts minority expression. Repression of Kurdish identity and politics in this period helps set conditions for the armed insurgency that emerges under the PKK.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) begins armed attacks seeking Kurdish rights and autonomy. Conflict escalates in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, causing tens of thousands of deaths and mass displacement, establishing the long‑running state–PKK confrontation that underlies today’s low‑intensity civil war dynamics.
Turkish intelligence, with foreign assistance, captures PKK leader Öcalan in Kenya. His arrest weakens the insurgency and leads to a PKK ceasefire and partial de‑escalation, but unresolved Kurdish demands and regional turmoil mean the conflict later resumes, framing present‑day negotiations and military operations.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) wins elections, curbing military influence and pursuing EU‑driven legal reforms, including some cultural openings for Kurds. These steps pave the way for later peace talks with the PKK, while centralizing political control that shapes current security policies.
War in Syria empowers Kurdish groups along Turkey’s border and allows Islamic State to emerge. Ankara backs some rebels and launches cross‑border operations. Syrian dynamics intertwine with the PKK question, making northern Syria and Iraq key theaters for today’s Turkish–Kurdish and counter‑ISIS campaigns.
Ankara opens talks with Öcalan and the PKK, leading to a ceasefire and hopes for a political solution to the Kurdish issue. The process reduces violence but stalls over disarmament and autonomy questions; its later collapse directly precedes the renewed conflict that continues at low intensity.
After the June 2015 election and disputes over Syria and Kurdish autonomy, the ceasefire breaks down. Heavy fighting erupts in southeastern cities and rural areas. This re‑escalation redefines the conflict’s modern phase, leading to intensified security operations that underpin today’s ongoing but reduced violence.
Elements of the military attempt to oust President Erdoğan but are defeated. Massive purges and a prolonged state of emergency follow, targeting suspected Gülenists and broader opposition. The government gains tighter control over security institutions, shaping subsequent counter‑PKK and cross‑border operations.
A 2017 referendum and 2018 elections replace parliamentary rule with an executive presidency. Power concentrates in the presidency over security, judiciary, and foreign policy, enabling more unified decisions on Kurdish policy, northern Syria, and Iraq, and structuring today’s approach to low‑intensity internal conflict.
Turkey intensifies sustained military campaigns, including Operations Claw and Claw‑Lock, targeting PKK bases in northern Iraq’s Duhok region. These operations push much combat outside Turkey’s borders while maintaining pressure on the PKK, explaining why current violence is lower yet continues across the frontier.
