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Between History and Strategy: Erdoğan, Öcalan, and the Three-Nation Vision

On July 11, 2025, a small band of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrillas gathered at the mouth of Jasana Cave near Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq for a ceremony few imagined possible. Clad in fatigues, thirty fighters – men and women – solemnly placed their AK-47 rifles and bandoliers into a large metal cauldron and set them aflame. The flames that consumed these weapons symbolized the end of a 40-year armed insurgency that had cost over 40,000 lives and scarred Turkey’s social fabric. Kurdish commanders like Bese Hozat declared the disarmament a voluntary step taken “in goodwill” to pursue freedom and democracy through politics rather than guerrilla war. This remarkable scene was set in motion by an even more astonishing intervention from the PKK’s founder and imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. From his island prison, Öcalan had issued a historic call in February for his fighters to lay down their arms and dissolve the PKK entirely. After decades as Turkey’s arch-enemy, Öcalan now proclaimed that armed struggle had run its course and that Kurds’ future lay “within democratic politics and law” of the Turkish state. In a video message – his first public appearance since 1999 – the 77-year-old Öcalan framed disarmament not as surrender but as a “voluntary transition” and a “historical gain” for his movement. Erdoğan’s ‘Turkish–Kurdish–Arab Alliance’ Rhetoric President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lost no time in seizing the narrative of this peace. The very next day, he announced the creation of a parliamentary commission – composed of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), its ultranationalist ally the MHP, and the pro-Kurdish Democracy and Equality Party (DEM) – to oversee the PKK’s transition from combat to politics. More dramatically, Erdoğan declared that history had turned a new page and unveiled a grand vision of regional unity. Turkey’s future, he proclaimed, would be built on a “Turkish–Kurdish–Arab alliance,” a partnership of three peoples who, he noted, “won victories in history when they united on the basis of Islam”. In an emotive flourish, he recited a roll call of “common cities”: “Damascus is our common city. Diyarbakır is our common city. Mardin, Mosul, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, Aleppo, Hatay, and Istanbul are our common cities.” Each name invoked the geography of the defunct Ottoman Empire, linking Turkish heartlands with Kurdish and Arab lands. Erdoğan’s rhetoric deliberately echoed historical touchstones. The litany of shared cities harked back to the 1920 Misak-ı Millî (National Pact) – the Ottoman parliament’s last vision of a post-WWI order – which claimed as Turkish patrimony all Ottoman territories with Muslim majorities. By invoking cities like Mosul, Aleppo and Kirkuk, Erdoğan appeared to be reviving that irredentist dream in modern garb. Indeed, as some observers note, the borders Turkey failed to secure after World War I now seemed to be reappearing “by stealth, not diplomacy” in Erdoğan’s narrative. At the same time, the President’s emphasis on Islamic unity – “when are united, then the Turk exists, the Kurd exists, the Arab exists” as he put it – channeled the spirit of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s pan-Islamism. Much like Abdülhamid’s 19th-century appeal for Muslim solidarity to preserve a crumbling empire, Erdoğan’s “Jerusalem Alliance” (as he dubbed it) calls Turks, Kurds and Arabs to come together as an ummah, healing the divisions imperial powers sowed among them. In Erdoğan’s telling, foreign plots had pitted brothers against each other – “the Arabs stabbed us in the back, the Kurds tried to divide us,” as Turkish ultranationalists often claim – and led to defeat and humiliation in past centuries. Now, by restoring Muslim brotherhood, Turkey could reclaim leadership in the region and prevent further “defeats” like the loss of Jerusalem or the Mongol and Crusader invasions Erdoğan invoked. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key political partner of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has also ignited widespread debate after proposing that one Kurdish and one Alevi figure be appointed as vice presidents. hiss proposal was first shared during a closed-door meeting of the MHP’s central executive board on July 18 and later confirmed in a written statement released on Monday. He framed the idea as a way to help heal Turkey’s long-standing ethnic and sectarian divisions, stating that the time had come to strengthen national unity through inclusive representation. Crucially, Erdoğan’s vision is framed not in the language of liberal democracy or equal citizenship, but in civilizational and religious terms. He pointedly argued that Islamic partnership was the source of past glory, sidestepping the secular republican ideals that modern Turkey was founded on. This has not been lost on observers. In fact, U.S. Ambassador Tom Barrack – a close ally of the Trump administration and now Washington’s special envoy to Syria and Lebanon– openly praised the Ottoman Empire’s millet system as a model for managing ethnic diversity, implicitly endorsing Erdoğan’s nostalgic framing. The Ottoman millet system, which governed diverse communities through religious autonomy, is held up as historical proof that Turks, Kurds, and Arabs can coexist under a single political roof without losing their identities. Ambassador Barrack’s musings on Ottoman pluralism were strikingly in harmony with Erdoğan’s rhetoric, a congruence that Turkish commentators found far from coincidental. Erdoğan appears to be uniting Turks and Kurds not through frameworks of citizenship, democracy, or human rights, but rather through the lens of religious solidarity. This ideological pivot raises a thorny question: Is the “Three-Nation Vision” a genuine effort at multicultural unity, or a clever repackaging of neo-Ottoman ambitions? Geopolitical Winds: Opportunity Amid Chaos The timing of Erdoğan’s grand initiative is hardly accidental. It comes against the backdrop of turbulent geopolitical shifts that have unsettled the Middle East in the past two years. The most dramatic was the fallout from the Israel–Hamas war of 2023 and its regional domino effect. In the year following Hamas’s October 2023 attack and the Gaza war, Israel expanded its military campaigns – striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and even launching air assaults on Iran. In a stunning turn of events that December, Syria’s Russian- and Iranian-backed ruler…