The PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the USA, and European Union – resumed its decades-old armed campaign in July 2015 while FETO supporters are said to have attempted the coup that left 240 people martyred.
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The crackdown comes as Ankara also pushes ahead with a purge of tens of thousands of supporters of US -based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Turkey of orchestrating the attempted coup in July. Mr. Gulen has repeatedly denied involvement.
Soylu said the move meant that local municipalities would no longer be controlled by “terrorists or those under instructions from Qandil”, referring to the PKK’s mountain base in northern Iraq.
Several hundreds gathered in Tunceli and Diyarbakir city to protest the dismissals, shouting slogans like “shoulder to shoulder against fascism”.
The purges of teachers and civil servants with suspected links to the P.K.K. can be done without parliamentary approval under the state of emergency.
The 24 municipalities were run by local associates of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest party in the national parliament, the Diyarbakir governor’s office said.
The scope of such massive crackdown has raised concern among rights groups and even Turkey’s Western allies, fearing that President Tayyip Erdogan is using the failed coup as a pretext to curb dissent.
A total of 11,285 personnel “linked to a separatist-terrorist organisation have been suspended”, Turkey’s education ministry said on its official Twitter account on Thursday. At least 40,000 people have been detained on suspicion of links to Gulen’s network.
Mr Erdogan said the “PKK has no chance of resistance against the power of our state”, despite an upsurge in violence that has seen hundreds of members of the security forces killed since a ceasefire ruptured in 2015.
Ocalan founded the armed movement to fight for greater rights for Turkey’s Kurds in the 1970s and led a bloody insurrection against the Turkish state that formally began in 1984.
“This unlawful and arbitrary action will only deepen existing problems in Kurdish towns and cause the Kurdish issue to be even more unsolvable”, it added.
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The operation aims to push Islamic State fighters back from the border and prevent Kurdish militia fighters seizing ground in their wake.
