During his stay in Washington, during which he participated in several conferences, the former Turkish Chief of Staff, General İlker Başbuğ, made the following bold declaration: in his opinion, the United States and Israel had arrested Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 so they could take control of the PKK, an organization of Turkish Kurds.

General Basbug follows Kemalism. He was trained at Sandhurst Military Academy (United Kingdom). At the end of the Cold War, he considered that there was no longer any reason for his country to continue to automatically serve Nato and, anxious to diversify its alliances, made contact with the Chinese Chief of Staff. Along with everyone else who participated in this initiative, he was arrested in 2013 and charged with belonging to Nato’s Ergenekon network. Following 7 months of imprisonment, he was set free and the entire Ergenekon proceedings was cancelled [1].

According to General Basbug, in the period that Ocalan was exiled in Damascus (from 1979 to 1999), the PKK was manipulated by the Syrian Secret Services but it gradually became a tool of the US following the imprisonment in Turkey of this communist leader.

The PKK leaders were moved from Syria to Denmark, where they remained till 2010. In 2013 they re-appeared in the North of Syria, in the territory occupied by US forces.

During recent years, the PKK abandoned its Marxist Lenin doctrine to adopt the anarchist ideology of the American Murray Bookchin. The PKK, previously an organization of the extreme left thus shifted to the right and is working with NATO [2]

Several former members of the PKK have assured Voltaire Network that Ocalan, who continues to be imprisoned in Turkey, was effectively a stranger to this 1800 ideological rotation of the political organization that elected him its leader in 1978.