July marks a year since the Kurdish militant group known as the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by numerous countries, symbolically burned their weapons.
Last May, the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, announced it would end its "work under the name of PKK," halting a decades-long armed insurgency between the Turkish state and those fighting for Kurdish rights or independence inside Turkey, one that had cost an estimated 40,000 lives.
Later, on July 11, a group of around 30 PKK fighters in northern Iraq burned their weapons in a symbolic disarmament ceremony.
This year, on that same date, human rights activists, academics and politicians gathered in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast, to assess progress in the ongoing peace process between the Turkish government and the PKK.
The conference was organized by Diyarbakir's administration and the Human Rights Association, or IHD.
