Kurdish Insurgent Group Declares Cease-Fire in Conflict With Turkey

The Kurdish guerrilla group that has been fighting a long-running insurgency against Turkey declared a cease-fire on Saturday, days after a call from its jailed leader to disarm and disband the organization raised hopes of ending a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people over four decades.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., said the cease-fire would begin immediately. But it also called for Abdullah Ocalan, the P.K.K.’s founder and leader who has been in a Turkish prison for a quarter-century, to be freed so he can oversee the group’s dissolution.

If the P.K.K. does disband, it would resolve a major domestic security threat and represent a political victory for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If negotiations proceed with Mr. Ocalan, it could usher in a new era of peace across the region where Kurds have pursued an armed struggle in a mountainous area that intersects parts of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

But there are still many unanswered questions.

“This is just the first sentence,” Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of Mr. Ocalan’s call to all groups to disarm.

It is not clear whether Turkey will cease armed operations against the P.K.K., who would monitor any truce or what would happen to fighters who do lay down their arms. There is also the question of whether the government has offered the Kurdish fighters anything in return.

But a cease-fire would allow Kurds to start internal consultations and hold local congresses to forge a democratic way forward, something Kurds in Turkey and Syria have said they want to do.