The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group said on Sunday it was withdrawing from Turkiye as part of a disarmament process being coordinated with the government, pressing Ankara to move ahead with steps allowing it to enter politics.

The PKK, which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, decided in May to disarm and disband after a call to end its armed struggle from its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan. The fighting has killed more than 40,000 people.

In July, the outlawed group, which is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkiye, the US and European Union, burned some weapons in a symbolic act of good faith.

In a statement read during an event in the Qandil Mountains, the group’s stronghold in northern Iraq, the PKK said it had decided to withdraw all of its militants from Turkiye to lay the foundations for a “free, democratic and brotherly life”.

PKK seeks transition to politics

It said the step reflected the group’s commitment to the disarmament and integration process, adding that the Turkish government should now pave the way for the PKK’s transition into “democratic politics” by passing integration laws.

As a senior official read the statement aloud at Sunday’s event, about two dozen PKK fighters stood in formation, with a large image of Ocalan prominently displayed in the background.

“We are on the path to executing leader Ocalan’s peace project,” PKK spokesperson Zagros Hiwa told Reuters from Qandil.

“Therefore, the other side, Turkiye, must carry out political changes and prepare a suitable environment for the project to be implemented,” Hiwa said.

President Tayyip Erdogan’s communications director, Burhanettin Duran, hailed the withdrawal announcement and said the government wanted to achieve lasting peace and security.

“This new step is a positive development in terms of the goal of the PKK laying down its weapons with all its elements,” Duran added in a post on X.

The PKK has been based in northern Iraq after being pushed well beyond Turkiye’s southeastern frontier in recent years. Turkiye’s military carries out regular strikes on PKK bases in the region and has established several military outposts there.

Over the years, the PKK’s goals shifted from seeking an independent state to seeking greater Kurdish rights and limited autonomy in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkiye.

Turkiye says it protects Kurdish rights but that it will not allow separatist moves.

The end of NATO-member Turkiye’s conflict with the PKK could have consequences across the region, including in neighbouring Syria, where the US is allied with Syrian Kurdish forces that Ankara deems a PKK offshoot. 

French authorities have detained two of the suspected robbers believed to have stolen precious crown jewels from the Louvre in a museum heist that stunned the world, officials said on Sunday.

A hundred investigators had been mobilised to track down the thieves who robbed the world-renowned museum in broad daylight on October 19, making off with jewellery worth an estimated $102 million in just a few minutes.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said they had “carried out arrests on Saturday evening”, after two sources close to the case had confirmed to AFP local media reports of the detentions.

“One of the men arrested was about to leave the country” from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport Beccuau said, confirming reports by Le Parisien and Paris Match.

One of the sources told AFP the man was about to board a plane for Algeria.

The second man had been detained not long afterwards in the Paris region, the media reports said.

The two men were taken into police custody on suspicion of organised theft and criminal conspiracy.

During the heist, robbers clambered up the extendable ladder of a stolen movers’ truck and, using cutting equipment, broke into a first-floor gallery.

They dropped a diamond, and emerald-studded crown as they fled down the ladder and onto scooters, but managed to steal eight other pieces, include an emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon Bonaparte gave his wife, Empress Marie-Louise.

The brazen theft has made headlines across the world and sparked a debate in France about the security of cultural institutions.

The Louvre’s director has admitted the robbers had taken advantage of a blind spot in the security surveillance of the museum’s outside walls.

But Beccuau said public and private security cameras elsewhere had allowed detectives to track the thieves “in Paris and in surrounding regions”.

Investigators were also able to find dozens of DNA samples and fingerprints at the scene.

The Louvre theft is the latest in a string of robberies targeting French museums.

Less than 24 hours after the Louvre break-in, a museum in eastern France reported the theft of gold and silver coins after finding a smashed display case.

Last month, criminals broke into Paris’s Natural History Museum, making off with gold nuggets worth more than $1.5 million. A Chinese woman has been detained and charged with involvement in the theft.

• Putin says it can pierce any missile defences.
• Cruise missile flew for 14,000 km, 15 hours.
• Test comes after United States’ tougher stance.

Russia has successfully tested its nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, a nuclear-capable weapon Moscow says can pierce any defence shield, and will move towards deploying the weapon, President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday.

The test, alongside a nuclear drill last week, sends a message that Russia, in Putin’s words, will never bow to pressure from the West over the war in Ukraine, as US President Donald Trump takes a tougher stance against Russia to push for a ceasefire.

Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, told Putin that the missile travelled 14,000 km (8,700 miles) and was in the air for about 15 hours when it was tested on October 21.

Russia says the 9M730 Burevestnik (Storm Petrel) — dubbed the SSC-X-9 Skyfall by Nato — is “invincible” to current and future missile defences, with an almost unlimited range and unpredictable flight path.

“It is a unique ware which nobody else in the world has,” Putin, dressed in camouflage fatigues at a meeting with generals overseeing the war in Ukraine, said in remarks released by the Kremlin on Sunday.

Since first announcing the 9M730 Burevestnik in 2018, Putin has cast the weapon as a response to moves by the United States to build a missile defence shield after Washington in 2001 unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and to enlarge the Nato military alliance.

Putin said on Sunday that he had once been told by Russian specialists that the weapon was unlikely to ever be possible, but now, he said, its “crucial testing” had been concluded.

He told Gerasimov, a trusted wartime commander, that Russia needed to understand how to class the weapon and prepare infrastructure for deploying the Burevestnik.

But the timing of the missile test — and its announcement by Putin in fatigues at a meeting at a command point with generals in charge of the Ukraine war – sends a signal to the West and to Trump in particular.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the missile.

Putin signals to Washington

For Trump, who has cast Russia as a “paper tiger” for failing to swiftly subdue Ukraine, the message is that Russia remains a global military competitor, especially on nuclear weapons, and that Moscow’s overtures on nuclear arms control should be acted on.

Putin’s message for the broader West, after the United States moved to provide Ukraine with intelligence on long-range energy infrastructure targets in Russia, is that Moscow can strike back if it wants to.

After The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration has lifted a key restriction on Ukraine’s use of some long-range missiles provided by Western allies, Putin said on Thursday that if Russia was attacked, the response would be “very serious, if not overwhelming.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated that message to Russian state TV in remarks published on Sunday.

Gerasimov said that the Burevestnik missile had flown on nuclear power and that this test had been different because it flew for such a long distance, though the range was essentially unlimited. He said it could defeat any anti-missile defences.

Putin on Wednesday oversaw a test of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces on land, sea and air to rehearse their readiness and command structure. Gerasimov said that training launches of Yars and Sineva intercontinental ballistic missiles had been completed along with two Kh-102 air-launched cruise missiles.

“The so-called modernity of our nuclear deterrent forces is at the highest level,” Putin said, higher than any other nuclear power.

In Ukraine, Gerasimov said that Russian forces had encircled large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers around Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, and were advancing in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.