Kurdish PKK fighters to begin disarming at key ceremony

PKK fighters were to begin laying down their weapons at a ceremony in Iraqi Kurdistan Friday, two months after the Kurdish rebels ended their decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.

The disarmament ceremony marks a turning point in the transition of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from armed insurgency to democratic politics, as part of a broader effort to draw a line under one of the region’s longest-running conflicts.

Founded in the late 1970s by Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK…