ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Turkish Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmus on Monday said once Ankara's intelligence and security agencies have confirmed that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have disarmed, the country will go into a phase of legal reforms to secure the peace process.

"After the security and intelligence units detect and register that the organization has laid down its arms, a period of certain legal arrangements regarding a Terror-Free Turkey will be entered," Numan Kurtulmus said during his speech at the Civil Society Meeting in western Turkey’s Balikesir.

A senior PKK source told The New Region on Saturday that the militant group will not disarm "without [Turkey] lifting the bans on the Kurdish language and laying the legal groundwork for the [peace] process."

The Kurdish language was banned in Turkey from the 1920s until the early 1990s. The restrictions have gradually been lifted since the early 2000s, but it is still not an official language, with only Turkish enjoying such status.

Despite the lifting of the prohibition of public use of the language, a publication by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in 2024 asserted that Ankara has been "actively repressing” Kurdish, pointing out "persistent efforts to discourage and eliminate the use of the Kurdish language."

"It is absolutely unacceptable for anyone to use their mother tongue as an excuse for political division. Everyone's mother tongue is as sacred as mother's milk," Kurtulmus said, stressing that linguistic diversity should be a source of unity, not division.

Earlier on Monday, Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) said the first phase of the peace process between Ankara and the PKK has been completed, a day after the Kurdish group announced the withdrawal of its forces from Turkey.

The PKK on Sunday issued a historic statement, declaring the withdrawal of "all guerrilla forces in Turkey" to the Medya Defense Areas in the Kurdistan Region, where the group’s headquarters in Qandil Mountain is located.

Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and the DEM Party have repeatedly expressed concern over the lack of concrete measures to establish a political framework ensuring the success of the peace process. On Sunday, a senior PKK commander urged Turkey to release Ocalan, who has been imprisoned on Imrali Island since 1999.

"With the complete abandonment of weapons from now on, we will enter a new era where only democracy and ideas are discussed," Kurtulmus said earlier in the day at the Balikesir University 2025-2026 academic year opening ceremony.

Devlet Bahceli, the leader of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), initiated the renewed peace process in October last year by urging Ocalan to address the Turkish parliament and call on his group to disarm.

A committee from the DEM Party—the main mediator of the peace talks—is set to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday. The delegation has already met with Erdogan twice since the peace talks began.