President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stood before a hall of newly commissioned staff officers on 10 July and put the country's terror file in the future tense. "God willing, with our Terror-Free Türkiye process reaching success, we will begin to write a new story at home and abroad," he said at the National Defence University graduation ceremony, according to Anadolu Ajansı. He added that Türkiye's security could be entrusted to no one, and that Ankara would not compromise on it.
Read the sentence closely and the tense is the story. Erdoğan spoke of the process "reaching success," not of a job finished. That gap, between what has happened and what officials hope will happen, is where the Terörsüz Türkiye effort actually sits a year in.
Start with what is on the record. In February 2025, the imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan called on the organization to hold a congress, disband, and lay down its weapons. That May, the PKK announced it would dissolve and give up armed conflict, closing roughly four decades of a terror campaign against the Turkish state. On 11 July 2025, a first group of PKK members destroyed weapons at a ceremony in Sulaymaniyah, in northern Iraq. Iraqi state media put the number at about 30, and everyone involved described it as symbolic, with the rest to follow in stages.
Here is the line to hold. A symbolic ceremony and a declared dissolution are not the same as a disarmed organization. Through late June and into July, AK Party and security sources told Turkish outlets that PKK disarmament had not been confirmed on the ground and had "not reached the desired point." Turkish officials say the national intelligence service, MİT, will be the body to certify full disarmament before the process moves to its next steps. Until that certification lands, the honest description is a process underway, not a weapon count closed.
The parliamentary track shows the same pattern of real progress short of completion. A cross-party commission, the National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission, was set up in August 2025 and adopted its report on 18 February 2026 by a reported 47 votes in favor, two against, and one abstention. The report is a road map, not a law. The measure it points toward, a separate and temporary framework for members who lay down arms and return to civilian life, has not passed. Parliament's Speaker, Numan Kurtulmuş, has been careful to call it a reintegration framework rather than an amnesty.
Kurtulmuş is also the source of the process's most quoted number. Speaking in Şırnak on 5 July, he said "about 80%" of the matter was now behind the country and that he hoped it would be largely finished before parliament's recess. That is a stated hope with a soft deadline attached, and Turkish reporting has described the pre-recess timetable as uncertain and slipping. Mehmet Uçum, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, wrote that the transition had "crossed a threshold of no return." His piece is signed analysis, so it reflects the government's framing rather than settled fact.
What has changed in a measurable way is the state's footprint. The Interior Ministry said in early July that it had removed 2,763 checkpoint and search posts under the Terörsüz Türkiye goal, and that 134 PKK-linked members had surrendered to security forces since the start of the year. Separately, MİT chief İbrahim Kalın met the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Bafel Talabani in Sulaymaniyah on 2 July to discuss the process and regional stability, part of Ankara's contacts across northern Iraq.
Not everyone in parliament reads the sequence the same way. İYİ Parti leader Müsavat Dervişoğlu argued against passing any reintegration law before disarmament is actually complete, and criticized the removal of checkpoints as premature.
One boundary matters through all of this. The process is about disarming an armed group, the PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. It is not about Kurdish citizens, whose language and identity sit entirely outside the terrorism file. Government figures have wrapped the effort in the language of national unity, and that is their framing to make. The reporter's job is narrower: the ceremony happened, the dissolution was declared, the checkpoints came down, and the final word on whether the guns are actually gone still belongs to a confirmation Ankara says has yet to come.