ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said that the country has entered a new phase, a day after the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) called on the group to lay down arms.

“As of yesterday, a new phase has begun in the efforts for a terror-free,” Turkish state media quoted Erdogan as saying. “It is our primary duty towards our nation to establish and strengthen an all-encompassing and inclusive climate in our country, where no one feels like an other.”

The Turkish president added that the country now has “the opportunity to take a historic step towards the goal of tearing down the wall of terror that has been built between our thousand-year-old brotherhood."

Abdullah Ocalan, 75,  jailed leader and founder of the PKK on Thursday called on his party to lay down arms against the Turkish state and dissolve itself in a historic declaration from Imrali Prison, where he has been held for 26 years.

The call is aimed at ending the decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish group that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Headquartered in the Kurdistan Region’s Mount Qandil, 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, Europe, and the US. 

Turkey considers the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and its military backbone the YPG as extensions of the PKK.

Earlier on Friday, Turkey’s ruling AK Party spokesperson Omer Celik told reporters that “the PKK, PYD, YPG, SDG... No matter what name it is given, the terrorist organization with all its elements and extensions in Iraq and Syria should lay down its arms and dissolve itself.”

In a major move, Devlet Bahceli, head of the far-right Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in October proposed 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. 

Ocalan has been serving a life sentence at Imrali prison, a small but high-security facility on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara, since February 1999.

In 2013, the Turkish government, led by then-prime minister and current President Erdogan, entered a peace process with the PKK aimed at ending the decades of conflict and bloodshed. The truce was short-lived and collapsed in July 2015, leading to violent clashes in Turkey’s southeastern Kurdish areas.