Abdullah Öcalan

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.

He attended elementary school in a neighboring village and wanted to join the Turkish army.

He applied to the military high school but failed in the admission exam.

Abdullah Öcalan (born 4 April 1949), also known as Apo (short for Abdullah in Turkish; Kurdish for "uncle"), is a political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

While some sources report his date of birth as 4 April 1949, no official birth records exist.

In 1966 he began to study at a vocational high school in Ankara (Ankara Tapu-Kadastro Meslek Lisesi) and attended meetings of anti-communists but also of circles active in left wing politics interested in improving Kurdish rights.

After graduating in 1969, Öcalan began working at the Title Deeds Office of Diyarbakır.

It was at this time his political affiliation began to take a form.

He was relocated one year later to Istanbul where he participated in the meetings of the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO).

Later, he entered the Istanbul Law Faculty but after the first year transferred to Ankara University to study political science.

His 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, ) 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.

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.

In 1975, together with Mazlum Doğan and, he published a political booklet which described the main aims for a Revolution in Kurdistan.

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.

He helped found the PKK in 1978, and led it into the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in 1984.

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).

Öcalan was based in Syria from 1979 to 1998.

In July 1979 he fled to Syria.

Since its foundation, the party focused on ideological training.

Marxism-Leninism, the history and estate of Kurdistan had a central role in the party.

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.

For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the PKK until the late 1990s.

Öcalan has advocated 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.

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's philosophy of democratic confederalism is applied in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), an autonomous polity formed in Syria in 2012.

Öcalan was born in Ömerli, a village in Halfeti, Şanlıurfa Province in eastern Turkey.

He was also involved in negotiations with the Turkish government that led to a temporary Kurdish–Turkish peace process in 2013.

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).