Abdullah Öcalan ( OH-jə-lahn; Turkish: [œdʒaɫan]; born 4 April 1948 or 1949), also known as Apo (short for Abdullah in Turkish; Kurdish for "uncle"), is a founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Öcalan was based in Syria from 1979 to 1998. He helped found the PKK in 1978, and led it into the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in 1984. For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the PKK until the late 1990s.
After being forced to leave Syria, Öcalan was abducted by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) in Nairobi, Kenya in February 1999 and imprisoned on İmralı island in Turkey, where after a trial he was sentenced to death under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which concerns the formation of armed organizations. The sentence was commuted to aggravated life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty. From 1999 until 2009, he was the sole prisoner in İmralı prison in the Sea of Marmara, where he is still held.
Öcalan has advocated for a political solution to the conflict since the 1993 Kurdistan Workers' Party ceasefire. Öcalan's prison regime has oscillated between long periods of isolation during which he is allowed no contact with the outside world, and periods when he is permitted visits. He was also involved in negotiations with the Turkish government that led to a temporary Kurdish–Turkish peace process in 2013. In February 2025, he issued a statement from prison calling on the PKK to disarm and disband itself, after which the group's leadership declared a unilateral ceasefire.
From prison, Öcalan has published several books. Jineology, also known as the science of women, is a form of feminism advocated by Öcalan and subsequently a fundamental tenet of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). Öcalan's philosophy of democratic confederalism is applied in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), an autonomous polity formed in Syria in 2012.
Öcalan was born in Ömerli, a village in the Halfeti district of Şanlıurfa Province in southeastern Turkey. Ömerli had a diverse population of Kurds, Turks, and Armenians, who were all integrated among each other. Öcalan claimed that his father was Kurdish, while his mother was Turkmen. Öcalan's maternal grandmother was a known Turk. While some sources report his date of birth as 4 April 1949, no official birth records exist. He has claimed not to know exactly when he was born, estimating the year to be 1946 or 1947. He is the oldest of seven children. Öcalan's father was poor even by local standards, and he once said that there was "always fighting" and "an overwhelming unhappiness" in his family.
When asked about their ethnic origin, his younger brother Osman Öcalan stated that their paternal family was fully Kurdish, while their maternal family was of mixed Kurdish, Turkish, Arab, and Assyrian origins. While Abdullah Öcalan claimed that their mother was fully Turkmen, Osman Öcalan disputed it, stating that many Albanian and other Balkan migrants were imported to the region by the Ottomans and identified as Turks, although he did not fully dismiss the possibility of their mother being Turkish. When asked about their surname, Osman Öcalan stated that "öc" meant "revenge" in Turkish, and that after Ottoman Turkish authorities came to their village and demanded women, his paternal grandfather Hüseyin Ağa refused and began fighting the Ottomans, during which his younger brother Abdi Ağa was killed. After the death of Abdi Ağa, Hüseyin Ağa led more revenge attacks on the Ottomans and drove them away. The family was celebrated by other Kurds and known as "Mala Ocê" ("House of Revenge"). After the Surname Law, the surname was Turkified to "Öcalan", meaning "revengeful".
Abdullah Öcalan spoke only Kurdish until elementary school, which he attended in a neighboring village. After he began school, he learned Turkish and began assimilating. He was impacted by Turkish nationalist school curriculum and dreamed of joining the Turkish army when he grew up. He applied to a military high school for future commissioned officers, but had failed the admission exam. Rejected from the military high school, Öcalan enrolled in a vocational high school in Ankara (Turkish: Ankara Tapu-Kadastro Meslek Lisesi) in 1966. During high school, he attended anti-communist meetings, and occasionally Pro-Kurdish meetings set up by left-wing circles. Öcalan did not think about his Kurdish identity in a political way until he was nearly 20 years old. Öcalan was also a very conservative Muslim in his youth and admired Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. After graduating in 1969, Öcalan began working at the Title Deeds Office of Diyarbakır. It was at this time his political affiliation began to reform. He was relocated one year later to Istanbul where he participated in the meetings of the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO), a Kurdish organization. Later, he entered the Istanbul Law Faculty but after the first year transferred to Ankara University to study political science.
According to a book by journalist Necdet Pekmezci, Öcalan's return to Ankara was facilitated by the state in order to divide the Dev-Genç (Revolutionary Youth Federation of Turkey), of which Öcalan was a member. President Süleyman Demirel later regretted this decision, since the PKK was to become a much greater threat to the state than Dev-Genç.
Öcalan was not able to graduate from Ankara University, as on 7 April 1972 he was arrested after participating in a rally against the killing of Mahir Çayan. He was charged with distributing the left-wing political magazine Şafak (published by Doğu Perinçek) and was held for seven months at the Mamak Prison. In November 1973, the Ankara Democratic Association of Higher Education, (Ankara Demokratik Yüksek Öğrenim Demeği, ADYÖD) was founded and shortly after he was elected to join its board. In the ADYÖD several students close to the political views of Hikmet Kıvılcımlı were active. In December 1974, ADYÖD was closed down. In 1975, together with Mazlum Doğan and Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, he published a political booklet which described the main aims for a Revolution in Kurdistan. During meetings in Ankara between 1974 and 1975, Öcalan and others came to the conclusion that Kurdistan was a colony and preparations ought to be made for a revolution. The group decided to disperse into the different towns in Turkish Kurdistan in order to set up a base of supporters for an armed revolution. At the beginning, this idea had only a few supporters, but following a journey Öcalan made through the cities of Ağrı, Batman, Diyarbakır, Bingöl, Kars and Urfa in 1977, the group counted over 300 adherents and had organised about thirty armed militants.
In 1978, in the midst of the right- and left-wing conflicts which culminated in the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, Öcalan founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). In July 1979 he fled to Syria.
Since its foundation, the party focused on ideological training. In 1987, Öcalan saw the success of the party as based on the application of Marxism–Leninism to the specific conditions of Kurdistan. Öcalan elaborated on the importance of ideology to the extent to where he condemned ideologylessness and equated ideology with religion which according to him had replaced the latter. "If you break the link between yourself and ideology you will beastialize," he told his followers. With the support of the Syrian Government, he established two training camps for the PKK in Lebanon where the Kurdish guerrillas should receive political and military training.
In 1984, the PKK initiated a campaign of armed conflict by attacking government forces in order to create an independent Kurdish state. Öcalan attempted to unite the Kurdish liberation movements of the PKK and the one active against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In negotiations between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the PKK, it was agreed that the latter was able to move freely in Iraqi Kurdistan. He also met twice with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the KDP in Damascus, to resolve some minor issues they had once in 1984 and another time in 1985. But due to pressure from Turkey the cooperation remained timid. During an interview he gave to the Turkish Milliyet in 1988, he mentioned the goal wasn't to gain independence from Turkey at all costs, but remained firm on the issue of the Kurdish rights, and suggested that negotiations should take place for a federation to be established in Turkey. In 1988, he also met with Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Damascus, with which he signed an agreement and after some differences after the foundation of a Kurdish Government in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 he later had a better relationship.