Turkish Militant Groups, Politics and the Kurdish Issue

Turkey on Jan. 5 released several long-jailed senior members of the indigenous militant group Hezbollah (no relation to the Lebanese group of the same name), a move allowed by an amendment to the Turkish penal code by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Whether or not it was the ruling party's aim to do so, their release will complement the AKP's strategy of keeping the three main groups that claim to be defenders of Turkey's Kurdish population — the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Gulen movement, and Hezbollah itself — balanced against each other. Keeping the country's restive Kurdish region in check and striking a nationalist chord is a political imperative for the AKP ahead of the June parliamentary elections, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hoping to gain an overwhelming majority in the parliament ahead of his expected run for the presidency in 2014.