Dutch sociologist Joost Jongerden has tracked the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for long enough to know its fighters have more than just "considerable support" in Europe, but a lucrative financial base that now looms over an emerging peace process with Turkey.
From experts such as Mr Jongerden, and a trail of court documents and intelligence reports, The National has gained an in-depth view of how the organisation is ruthless in extracting revenue from within and beyond Europe's Kurdish diaspora.
"They go door-to-door to collect money for the struggle," Mr Jongerden said. “In the diaspora you see that they organise their community centres around the idea of self-organisation, that in these centres they also do ideological and political education."
The PKK uses extortion to collect a "revolutionary tax" from Kurds in Europe and exploits events such as earthquakes in Turkey and Syria to raise millions of euros a year in donations, security services believe. EU officials tracking the PKK's activities are increasingly alarmed by its links to the drugs trade and organised crime.
Banned in most of Europe, the PKK is known to have infiltrated Kurdish community centres to spread the views of its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan to the diaspora. It has also staged rallies, broadcast propaganda films and forged ties with left-wing sympathisers, despite pressure from Turkey to chase down its operatives in Nato countries such as Sweden and Finland.
Ocalan's recent call from prison for the PKK to lay down arms opens a new phase in the group’s campaign for autonomy. His supporters are pushing to end the PKK's pariah status in Europe, arguing in an EU court that their armed guerrilla campaign against Turkey is a legitimate struggle for independence.
But Turkish authorities are likely to remain in a "locked and loaded" stance as doubts remain whether the PKK "has the discipline to actually implement" Ocalan's instructions, said Richard Outzen, a retired US Army colonel and former defence attache who advised the State Department on Turkey and Syria.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned in an Eid Al Fitr message that his country's "time and patience are not limitless". The PKK has "multiple incentives to delay, as long as they can, fundamentally giving up the weapons and the control they have", Mr Outzen told The National. "Let's face it, they have monetary incentives. Some of these people have many economic empires set up and it's hard to give that up."
'Tax' collection
From recent court cases in France, a picture has emerged of how PKK networks conduct their sophisticated "tax" collection. Prosecutors followed a trail of two missing teenage women to uncover a network around a Kurdish centre in Marseille.
Centres in Marseille and Paris have been used to oversee collection of the "tax", it is believed. Some Kurds pay voluntarily in solidarity with the PKK's cause, while others need persuasion.
One operative with a track record of PKK activities in Germany ran “co-ordination missions” with fellow Kurdish activists and “exerted certain pressure on reluctant taxpayers”, a court said. In a further stage, a second PKK man with the initials AC was described as chasing up “late payers” of the levy and “not hesitating” to issue threats if necessary.
One witness in the French case said he was threatened with having his legs broken. In a criminal case in Paris, in which 11 people were convicted of terrorist financing, the court said people were threatened with “exclusion from the community” if they did not pay.
Finally, another member of the group was put in charge of creating PKK-managed co-operatives that would launder the secret funds before they were transferred out of France. The PKK’s operatives ensure the money is handed over “through the use of physical violence or intimidation”, as a French court said in October.
Lucrative business
In Sweden, the PKK's activities were brought into the open when a Kurdish man held a Stockholm businessman at gunpoint in a restaurant, demanding he hand over money to the fighters. Investigators said a "senior PKK leader" personally travelled to Stockholm to prepare the attempted blackmail.
The gunman was sentenced to more than four years in jail for his role in what a Swedish court called the PKK's "very extensive fund-raising activity in Europe". The case from 2023 was closely watched because Turkey was pressuring Sweden to crack down on the PKK as a condition of joining Nato.
Raising money is a prime reason for the PKK to station operatives in Europe but Mr Jongerden said the group used its operatives to rally support for the cause. Its European network of organisations "very much orient themselves to the thought of Ocalan", he said. These groups have followed a shift in the PKK’s narrative away from forming an independent Kurdish state towards a mindset of “self-organisation and self-government” at a local level. “This narrative is also being implemented abroad,” he said.
Financial needs
Without the kind of territorial sway that ISIS once held in Iraq and Syria, the PKK has long been "dependent on illicit financing", said Mr Outzen. He said the party's annual kampanya (campaigns) consist of "extortion, essentially, from doner kebab shops all across Europe and small businesses in the Kurdish diaspora".
He described the PKK as a disciplined organisation that plays down its hard-left ideological roots to win broad support from Kurds in Europe. "They've done a pretty good job of creating a generalised impression in the West that the PKK and the Kurds are synonymous terms," he said.
"What they do, especially in the diaspora, is that they either create or take over the local Kurdish community groups, and then whenever there's Nowruz, or other important dates, they will hang Ocalan's picture up and portray him as a Kurdish freedom fighter."
Sweden's security service warned in an annual report this month that the PKK collects "large sums of money" in a structured way, with the Stockholm gun incident only one example. In Germany, the amount raised has been estimated as high as €17 million ($18.6 million) a year in cash, overseen by a PKK financial bureau.
In Germany, one PKK fund-raiser code-named Ali sent about €223,000 to the organisation by himself after overseeing events and donation campaigns in part of the country. In return he was paid expenses of about €250 a month.
In Austria, PKK sympathisers called for donations after the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in early 2023, according to intelligence services. They said the amount raised "made clear that the potential is there to generate sizeable sums".
The PKK can field thousands of fighters, and military experts believe it may have got its hands on advanced anti-missile drones as well as older stocks of weapons.
"What do you do if you don't control a state economy and you need to maintain an armed force? You do these sorts of activities," Mr Outzen said. "In terms of how the money is collected, what the goals are in terms of who has to collect how much, the targets, how it is funnelled back to financiers in different financial hubs – I think those decisions are all made pretty centrally."
Criminal activity
Turkey accuses the PKK of running drugs on European streets, using the heroin trade to make “easy and plentiful profits”. It claims PKK members extort money from drug traffickers heading to Europe under the pretence of collecting taxes.
The Turkish accusations paint a picture of a PKK drugs trade dating back to the 1990s and 2000s. In one case, a convicted heroin trafficker who staged a spectacular escape from a Danish prison using a bulldozer was described in a German court as the PKK’s second-in-command in the drugs trade.
In a briefing to EU drugs chiefs in 2019, terrorism expert Rajan Basra said the PKK operated in a "known trafficking corridor" in south-eastern Turkey and had strongholds "along the strategic heroin trafficking route which extends from Afghanistan, via Iran and Turkey, to Europe".
He described some of Turkey's statements as "alarmist" and authorities in Europe have tended to play down the drugs claims, casting them as isolated cases or unproven allegations by Turkey. But in 2023, EU crime-fighting agency Europol said the PKK’s illegal sources of funding “include drug trafficking and fraud”.
By 2024, Europol said the PKK's fund-raising efforts ranged across extortion, fraud, racketeering and money laundering, as well as "apparently legitimate" activities such as donations and membership fees. It says there have been signs of the PKK abducting people and enlisting them as fighters against their will.
Ocalan's ideology
Ocalan, who founded the Marxist-inspired PKK in 1978, has been held in a Turkish island prison since 1999, communicating with the outside world via relatives and supporters. While Turkey condemns him as a terrorist ringleader, he remains a hero to many Kurds.
In Ocalan's message on February 27, ferried to an Istanbul hotel and read out in Kurdish and Turkish, he declared "all groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself" as part of a peace process. It was the PKK's first major olive branch to Turkey since a two-year ceasefire collapsed into bloody violence in 2015.
Within hours the message was being broadcast across Europe, the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), which has its headquarters in Brussels, issued a statement saying the call for peace was a "historic opportunity" for the Kurdish question to be "resolved democratically".
A second group in Belgium, the European Kurdish Democratic Societies Congress (KCDK-E), said Ocalan's message had "created great excitement and happiness among millions of Kurds living in Europe". In a joint statement with a Kurdish Women's Movement (TJK-E), it praised Ocalan for taking a "democratic and inclusive approach".
"They could make this statement so quickly because this whole idea of what a political solution entails has been discussed over the last years and decades, quite intensively, within the diaspora and also within Turkey itself," Mr Jongerden said.
"There has been a stream of publications by Ocalan and these are constantly being discussed in the movement. They way in which they align is more based on training, on education, on political education, on discussions, than on a chain of command."
The political education is "the way in which the new narrative of the PKK about democratisation and self-organisation sticks", he said.
Intelligence agencies have been tracking the PKK's propaganda work in Europe for years. Two recent films called Kobane and Letters from Shengal, produced by PKK-linked media outlets and depicting the group's YPG sister fighters in Syria, were shown to audiences in Germany. In the south of the country, Ocalan's face was displayed on banners during events marking 45 years of the PKK.
Similar rallies have taken place in Austria calling for Ocalan's release, sometimes with the support of local left-wing groups. German intelligence similarly reports that "left-wing extremists" have helped to produce pro-Kurdish propaganda.
Resisting the crackdown
The PKK has been listed as a terrorist group in the EU since 2002. Suspects have been held under counter-terrorism laws in Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Sweden under efforts to enforce the ban.
German authorities say PKK operatives try to appear respectable and do not generally commit crimes other than disturbances at protests. Sweden tightened its anti-terrorism laws under pressure from the Turkish veto at Nato, as under previous rules there was little police could do about PKK members if their terrorist activities took place abroad.
"The fact that the organisation is on the list of terrorist organisations sometimes makes it more difficult, in particularly in Germany where the repression towards the Kurdish movement is pretty strong," said Mr Jongerden, who has studied the Kurdish movement and the PKK for two decades. "But I think overall it didn't affect them too much. It makes them cautious."
The PKK has fought back via lawsuits and protests. London's Big Ben was the scene of a demonstration in November after seven counter-terrorism arrests linked to a Kurdish community centre in north London. Police insisted the raids were "targeted specifically" at the suspects and not at the wider Kurdish community.
At the European Court of Justice, the PKK's lawyers have dredged up UK and US decisions from more than 20 years ago in an all-guns-blazing effort to see the terror listing lifted. They urged the court to consider the fate of "people who, in order to achieve self-determination, have no choice but to resort to armed force".
The court rejected the appeal, saying the PKK's actions can still be classed as terrorist even if they have an "ultimate or underlying objective" of promoting democracy. It means the group remains on a list with the likes of ISIS and Hamas – at least for now.
