Turkey’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said on Tuesday terrorists in Turkey from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) currently number around 790, the lowest figure in recent years, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Speaking in the Kalana military zone in Yüksekova, southeastern Turkey, Soylu said at least 47 PKK terrorists had been “neutralized” in domestic security operations in the last week alone.
The word “neutralized” is used to imply that the terrorists in question either surrendered or were killed or captured.
This year a total of 61 people have joined the PKK terrorist group, while 91 terrorists have so far surrendered, he said.
Turkey has been the scene of a more than 30-year PKK insurgency, with armed conflict and terrorist attacks leaving more than 40,000 people dead and causing millions of people to move from the southeastern part of the country to its west.
In the early 2000s, security experts claimed the PKK regularly positioned around 3,000 militants inside Turkey.
Security forces have been conducting a large-scale operation against the PKK since 2015, after negotiations for peace between the Turkish government and the terrorist group were halted after the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s election success on June 7, 2015 by garnering more than 10 percent of the vote.