In January 2013, the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) government in Turkey officially declared that it had initiated peace talks with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kürdistan Workers’ Party). This was a historic moment that could have ended one of the longest conflicts in the Middle East. However, the peace talks failed. A new process was began in 2024, but this time it brings more anxiety than hope. The Kurdish issue, a protracted conflict rooted in historical injustices, emerged from the foundation of the Turkish state and its systematic assimilation policies and oppression practices towards Kurds. It turned into an armed conflict in 1984 with the establishment of the armed group, the PKK. The early years of the conflict were marked by massive, arbitrary detentions and systematic torture in prisons, including the Diyarbakır Military Prison (DMP), which was ranked fourth among the world’s most brutal prisons by Time magazine in 2008 (The Diyarbakır Military Prison Project | Memorialize Turkey, 2008). The armed conflict reached its peak during the 1990s, marked by large-scale violations, including killings, burning of villages, forced displacement, the use of mass graves, and thousands of enforced disappearances.