A Kurdish militia group that has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for four decades said on Monday that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reshape Turkish politics and reverberate in neighboring countries.
The announcement by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym, P.K.K., came a few months after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, urged the group to disarm and disband. In his February message, he said the group’s armed struggle had outlived its initial purpose and that further progress in the struggle for Kurdish rights could be achieved through politics.
The P.K.K. began as a secessionist group that sought to create an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. More recently, it has said that it sought greater rights for Kurds inside Turkey. It is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries.
In a statement on Monday, the group echoed Mr. Ocalan’s call, saying that it had “carried the Kurdish issue to a level where it can be solved by democratic politics, and the P.K.K. has completed its mission in that sense.”
A recent congress by the group’s leaders in northern Iraq had decided to end “the work under the name of P.K.K.’’
The group said Mr. Ocalan should lead the process of disarming, and it called on Turkey’s Parliament to take part. The move could end a conflict that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
It was unclear what would happen next. Mr. Ocalan has been held in near isolation in a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara after his capture by Turkish intelligence in 1999. The P.K.K. and pro-Kurdish politicians have called for his release, or at least for a loosening of the restrictions on him to allow him to oversee the disarmament process.
Many Kurds in Turkey have also expressed hopes that the end of the conflict would lead the government to formally expand Kurdish cultural and educational rights, but no new legislation on such issues appears imminent.
The long conflict, in which P.K.K. militants bombed civilian areas and the Turkish military responded with great force, has led to pitched battles in Kurdish-majority cities.
Monday’s announcement is a boon for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He can claim to have done what his predecessors failed to do, and the P.K.K.’s dissolution could expand his support among Kurds, which many analysts suspect that he covets to change the Constitution and seek a third presidential term.
In a social media post, Omar Celik, a spokesman for Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party, said the P.K.K.’s announcement was an important step in Mr. Erdogan’s work to ensure a “terror-free Turkey.”
The P.K.K.’s declaration could also influence other Kurdish militias, particularly in Syria, and shift regional dynamics beyond Turkey’s borders.
The Kurds — an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people — are spread across Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. They were promised but never granted their own nation by world powers after World War I and have since launched various rebellions against governments that have sought to suppress their cultural identity.
In nearly every country where they live, Kurds have faced state-sponsored suppression of their language and culture.
It was not immediately clear how the decision would affect the P.K.K. bases hidden in the mountainous areas of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. Turkey has repeatedly bombarded P.K.K. strongholds in northern Iraq, as well as the group’s offshoot controlling the northeastern regions of Syria, branding them a terrorist threat near its borders.
Turkish officials have said publicly that the government offered no concessions to the P.K.K. to persuade it to disarm. But officials from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party have expressed hope that the government would expand cultural and educational rights for Kurds.
Safak Timur contributed reporting.
Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief, covering Turkey and the surrounding region.
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