Apart from the fact that they control the vast majority of Europe’s heroin trade to fund their activities, we are talking about a group of people whose main victims are overwhelmingly Kurdish, a group that thinks nothing of targetting tourists just to hurt the trade and a group that is known to line teachers up and gun them down because they work for the state.

There has been a great deal of political oppression against Kurdish culture to try and stem the separatism - however Kurds have always been over-represented in Turkish politics and have always held positions in cabinet including Presidents and Prime Ministers. This has remained true throughout the 22 years that the PKK has been active. The PKK does not represent Turkish Kurds; the majority of Turkish Kurds do not vote for PKK affiliated political parties, which are allowed to be involved in Turkish politics.

There is also a ridiculous trend of calling this oppression a ‘genocide’. In a bloody guerrilla war which has spanned over 2 decades, some 37,000 people are estimated to have died - once you remove from this figure the victims of the PKK including Turkish, Kurdish and foreign civilians and the thousands of Turkish troops, you are left with a figure of a few thousands who were either PKK militants themselves or Kurdish civilians (impossible to distinguish accurately due to the non-uniformed nature of the group - but it would be fair to say that not everyone killed was a militant, nor that no militants at all have been killed). Given the timespan, this figure is remarkably low - and given the region, it is a figure I had trouble believing without conducting my own research. It is true, however, that many Kurds have been displaced by the fighting. Compensation for this is being negotiated.