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ANKARA: Militant fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) will begin handing over weapons in groups in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah on Friday as part of a peace process with Turkiye, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported on Tuesday.
The PKK — locked in a bloody conflict with the Turkish state for more than four decades — decided in May to disband and end its struggle, following a public call from the group’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan in February.
NTV said, without citing sources, that Ocalan would send a video message to the PKK’s base in northern Iraq’s mountainous Qandil region to call for a mechanism for the disarmament process. It would be the first video featuring his face and voice since his jailing in 1999.
The whole process is expected to take around two to five months, NTV said, adding that militants who hand in weapons will stay in Iraq and halt any PKK activities.
On Monday, a delegation from the pro-Kurdish DEM party — Turkiye’s third-biggest party, which played a key role facilitating the disarmament decision — met with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara to discuss the process.
NTV earlier reported that Ibrahim Kalin, the head of Turkiye’s MIT intelligence agency, would travel to Baghdad on Tuesday for talks with Iraqi officials to discuss the weapons handover.
Since the PKK launched its insurgency against Turkiye in 1984 — originally with the aim of creating an independent Kurdish state — the conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, imposed a huge economic burden and fueled social tensions.
Ankara says skirmishes between Turkish soldiers and PKK militants in southeastern Turkiye and northern Iraq have continued since the group’s decision to disband, adding that Turkiye was still raiding PKK storage areas and bases in the region.

PARIS: A man who saved several people including children and babies from a fire last week in Paris while balancing on a narrow ledge will be decorated for his courage.

Fousseynou Cissé is making headlines in France after risking his life to help those trapped in a top-floor apartment located in a northern district of Paris.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said on Monday that he would be awarding Cissé a medal “in recognition of his courage and dedication.”

“This medal recognizes republican courage that commands admiration,” Nunez said.

According to local media, two families were trapped by the fire on Saturday and took refuge in a flat on the top floor. When Cissé realized there was a fire, he decided to leave the building to protect himself, his wife and child.

“As I was leaving, (my neighbor) called me over and told me that there were people trapped upstairs,” he told France Info.

Cissé went to the neighboring apartment, climbed out of the window, and stood on a railing linking the two apartments, 20 meters (65 feet) from the void, in order to evacuate the victims trapped by the toxic fumes.

Cissé then evacuated children who were handed over through a window by their mothers, passing them to the neighbor in an adjacent apartment. He helped the children over the ledge before helping the two mothers reach safety.

“It wasn’t calculated; it was instinct: ‘We’ve got to go’. So I jumped in to help,” he said.

In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron lauded as a hero a migrant from Mali who scaled an apartment building to save a child dangling from a balcony, and rewarded the young man’s bravery with an offer of French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.

The 39-year-old Cissé reportedly works as a receptionist in secondary schools. He does not have French citizenship but holds a residence permit.

“If you’re not a French national, you won’t get hired,” he said. Asked by France Info what he might wish for as a reward after his heroic gesture, he replied that he hoped “it might loosen things up, and that things would settle down" so that he could be hired by the Paris town hall.