PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) Committee for Solidarity with Martyrs’ Families issued a written statement that included the following:

“Our struggle for freedom advances in the 40th year of our party’s anniversary, growing every day and gaining new ground, reaching the apex in all parts. Courageous Kurdish sons and daughters are fighting for the most natural of Kurdish people’s rights, to create a free life and the individual with identity, character and dignity, and to gain life. In the 21st century, they fight heroically, without flinching, as if in a dance, to gift the humane and free life with character to their people. We commemorate our comrades who have fought as those who gift the good and beautiful and have reached the sacred level of martyrdom with respect and gratitude. We bow in respect for their memories.

PKK’s 40 yearlong resistance for freedom is the resistance of the Kurdish people to live free, independent and as their own self, and a resistance against tyranny under all circumstances. Such a resistance seldom occurs elsewhere, and is the hope of the Kurdish people and the peoples of the Middle East. What makes our struggle of 40 years lock on to success, become the leader of great revolutionary developments, allows for the sacrificial way of participation for revolutionary values, develops a culture of resistance and urges us and society as a whole into the struggle is the values our martyrs create.

The reality of the PKK and martyrs has resurrected a people buried deep in the ground, and covered in concrete, springing through the earth and smashing the concrete. This reality created a new language and culture for a people who had their language banned and culture facing exhaustion. It has brought its own people and socialization back from the ashes. At times they resisted the enemy with their lives when it was all that they had in the death fasts. They challenged the fascist and the tyrant. At times they showed the whole world how a stance condemning surrender would be by throwing themselves off cliffs. They wanted to show us how to be a free man and a free woman, how to fight for freedom in their style of action, reminding the enemy once more of who they are by exploding in the fortress and the heart of the enemy’s trusted citadels. Our martyrs have shown the enemy how to die for the identity of the free Kurd if need be, to not bow down, not surrender, to maintain honor.

This stance held the Kurdish people standing and increased the struggle, adding values upon values, creating meaning in life, with labor, sweat and sacrifice. The PKK grew every day with its martyrs, became the people, led all parts of society and made its presence permanent. And this reality was created through the reality of our martyrs, our sacred value. The reality of martyrs became a response to the Kurdish society’s search for existence, for being their own self with their own language, culture and faith. We know that this reality is one the fascist Turkish state can’t tolerate. The intensifying recklessness of recent attacks clearly expresses this fact.

Previous damage done to the martyrs’ cemeteries, pressure put on families and aerial attacks directly targeting our martyrs’ cemeteries had shown us the true face of the enemy. But the recent attacks against our sacred spaces, our martyrs’ cemeteries, and even stealing our bodies from the cemeteries, is an expression of everything going haywire. This exposes a toxic, malignant fascism and is unprecedented in human history. We are faced with the reality of an enemy that can’t tolerate our martyrs’ cemeteries. It would be lacking and wrong to call this situation they enter in the face of a 40-year long struggle, the reality of a people, a society and the values they created just a stance of animosity. Because we know that there is a code in even enmity. There is a morality, there are principles. But the enemy we are faced with has sunk to the bottom morally, and knows no principles or rules of war, engaged in approaches that fall within the realm of war crimes. They have meddled with our sacred values, our martyrs’ cemeteries have been torn to the ground and our bodies have been secretly abducted to an unknown location. They have disrespected our martyrs, who are the guarantee of the existence and freedom of the Kurdish people.

We would like to state that any human, anybody who believes they fit somewhere within this struggle, anybody who has honor and conscience should sit and think in the face of this tyranny. Today is the day to increase the resistance against the denialist, genocidal, thieving, murderous mindset of fascism that doesn’t even leave us to rest peacefully buried inside our own earth. Today is the day to rise up against the malignant state forces engaged in crimes against humanity, as Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, Alevis, young and old, man and woman, all sections of society. We are calling on our people to defend our martyrs and our martyrs’ cemeteries, our sacred values, in the face of the desperation of the AKP state, Erdoğan and their cohorts. Wherever we are, we have a debt to our martyrs to show our stance as a human duty.”