Erdoğan’s Triple Victory: How Turkey Dismantled Three Decades of Armed Threats
For nearly a decade, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has waged — and largely won — a multi-front campaign against the armed groups that have threatened Turkey’s stability and territorial integrity. This week’s developments in Syria bring that campaign to a symbolic culmination.
ISIS: denied a foothold on Turkey’s border. Through Operation Euphrates Shield and subsequent cross-border campaigns beginning in 2016, Turkish forces pushed ISIS out of a strip of northern Syria along its border, closing off a sanctuary the group had used to move fighters and materiel. Combined with sustained interdiction efforts inside Turkey itself, Ankara ensured ISIS could not entrench on Turkish soil even as the group held territory elsewhere in Syria and Iraq.
FETO: the coup that failed. On the night of July 15, 2016, Erdoğan faced down a coup attempt by military elements linked to the Gülen movement (FETO), appearing on live television to call citizens into the streets. The coup collapsed within hours. In the years since, Ankara has systematically dismantled FETO’s infrastructure within the state — military, judiciary, education, police — removing a network that had spent decades embedding itself in Turkish institutions.
PKK: four decades of insurgency ending at the negotiating table. After Abdullah Öcalan’s February 2025 call for dissolution, the PKK disbanded in May 2025 and staged a weapons-burning ceremony in Sulaymaniyah that July. This month, Turkey’s parliament passed the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration by a decisive 468-vote margin — with backing from Erdoğan’s AK Party, MHP, and even the pro-Kurdish DEM Party — creating a legal framework for reintegrating former militants. It is the furthest any Turkish government has gotten toward closing a conflict that has killed over 40,000 people since 1984.
SDF: the northeastern flank falls into line. On August 25, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi announced the group’s dissolution as an independent military force, with its brigades folded into the Syrian national army under President Ahmed al-Sharaa. For Ankara, this closes off the scenario it warned about for a decade: a PKK-linked, autonomously armed force entrenched along Turkey’s southern border. With Damascus now asserting unified control and Kurdish forces absorbed into state structures, the strategic buffer Ankara sought is materializing.
Taken together, these four threads — ISIS contained, FETO purged, PKK disarming, SDF dissolved — mark the most consequential stretch of counter-terrorism outcomes in modern Turkish history, achieved through a combination of military resolve and, in the final and most difficult case, patient diplomacy.
