ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - To discuss the outcome of their two meetings with jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdulla Ocalan and ongoing efforts to resume peace talks in Turkey, a top pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) delegation will visit the Kurdistan Region on February 16 and meet with Kurdistan Region officials, according to a statement published on DEM party’s official website.

The delegation is set to meet with Masoud Barzani and President of the Kurdistan Region Nechirvan Barzani on February 16, then head to Sulaimani to meet Bafel Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Region a day after.

The DEM Party delegation will consist of the Imrali delegation members Pervin Buldan and Sirri Sureyya Onder and the party’s key officials.

The meetings will include talks on the Kurdish issue in Turkey, and the details of the delegation’s recent two meetings with PKK leader Ocalan.

“The opinions, suggestions, and thoughts of the relevant people regarding the process will be taken and then conveyed to Mr. Ocalan,” the DEM Party said of their planned meetings in the Kurdistan Region.  

Tuncer Bakirhan, a Kurdish lawmaker in the Turkish parliament, revealed last week that Ocalan will “make a historic call” for a permanent solution to the Kurdish issue in Turkey.

"Mr. Ocalan is preparing to make a historic call in the coming days for a radical and permanent solution to the Kurdish problem and the construction of a democratic Turkey,” Bakirhan, a lawmaker and co-leader of DEM Party said 

In a major move, Devlet Bahceli, head of the far-right Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), proposed in October allowing Ocalan to appear before the legislature and declare the dissolution of the PKK, an initiative immediately endorsed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish political landscape. 

This initiative led to the DEM Party MPs Buldan and Onder being granted the rare permission to meet with Ocalan at Imrali prison in December amid a shift in Ankara’s stance of prohibiting contact with the PKK founder.

MHP’s Bahceli, however, after the first meeting with Ocalan, warned that any other meeting with jailed Ocalan must end in the dissolution of the PKK.

The PKK is an armed group that has fought for increased Kurdish rights in Turkey for decades. The group is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara.