, has said he received a handwoven rug commissioned by Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in an unusual gesture that has drawn attention given his longstanding enmity toward Öcalan.){kind=link}
Devlet Bahçeli, leader of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has said he received a handwoven rug commissioned by Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in an unusual gesture that has drawn attention given his longstanding enmity toward Öcalan.
In a recent interview with the TV100 station, Bahçeli said the rug was presented to him on December 12, 2025, during a visit to parliament by a delegation from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party).
He said the rug had been specially woven in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa at Öcalan’s request.
Bahçeli said he thanked Öcalan for the gift and described it as a gesture reflecting “sincerity regarding Turkish-Kurdish unity and brotherhood,” adding that he named the rug “The February 27, 2025, Peace and Democracy Rug,” citing a cultural tradition in which rugs are given symbolic names.
“In our culture, every rug has a name,” Bahçeli said. “I accepted it with satisfaction and told the visiting delegation that I was naming it the February 27, 2025, Peace and Democracy Rug.”
The date refers to a landmark call Öcalan made urging the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve itself, following a surprise call from Bahçeli in October 2024 that marked the start of a new peace initiative aimed at ending the group’s decades-long armed campaign.
Bahçeli asked jailed PKK leader Öcalan to instruct his group to renounce its armed campaign while hinting that the end of PKK violence could lead to Öcalan’s freedom.
As a result the PKK announced in May that it would lay down its weapons and dissolve itself.
Thirty PKK militants burned their weapons in July in a ceremony in northern Iraq, marking a symbolic first step towards ending the decades-long conflict with Turkey in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.
Öcalan, who has been imprisoned on the island of İmralı since 1999, is serving a life sentence. He is the founder of the PKK, designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies.
Öcalan’s gesture, and Bahçeli’s acceptance of it, are widely seen as unusual given Bahçeli’s past rhetoric, in which he referred to Öcalan as a “baby killer” and a “chief terrorist.”
The MHP leader has long been one of Turkey’s most vocal opponents of any engagement with the PKK or its jailed leader and was a fierce critic of the government-led peace talks with the group that collapsed in 2015.
During that period Bahçeli repeatedly rejected negotiations with Öcalan and described the peace process as a threat to Turkey’s national unity.
Bahçeli is a key political ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who endorsed the renewed peace talks with the PKK.
Tensions in Syria
The disclosure of the gift comes amid heightened regional tensions linked to developments in Syria, where the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led group that partnered with the US military in the fight against the Islamic State group and controlled much of northeastern Syria as recently as November, lost most of that territory to Syrian government forces earlier this month.
Turkey views the SDF as tied to the PKK through its leading faction, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), and has carried out repeated cross-border military operations in Syria over what it describes as threats to Turkish security.
The rug was presented weeks earlier, before those tensions escalated, suggesting the exchange took place in a different political climate, when the peace process with the PKK was relatively on track.
Following the tensions in Syria, which led to pro-Kurdish protests in Turkey, Bahçeli sharpened his stance and raised suspicions about the future of the peace talks.
He warned last week that rising tensions linked to developments in Syria could derail Turkey’s peace process with the PKK following an incident in which a Turkish flag was taken down during protests near the Turkey-Syria border.
“Exhausting patience and provoking nerves will bring no benefit to anyone,” Bahçeli said. “The extended hand could easily be replaced by a raised fist,” he added, in a warning that restraint could give way to confrontation.
It marked Bahçeli’s strongest warning to date since the launch of the peace process, raising questions about its future.
Turkey set up a cross-party parliamentary committee in August to lay the groundwork for the peace process and prepare a legal framework for the political integration of the PKK and its militants.
It is not yet known whether this new process will succeed since another attempt launched in 2013 collapsed two years later, sparking renewed clashes between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces.