Released on Thursday, the report titled "The Forgotten Foreign Fighters: The PKK in Syria" gives a detailed account of the PKK's background, and its fight against the Turkish government, as well as its relations with international actors.

"The PKK was uprooted from Turkey by the coup d’état of 1980 and took shelter in Syria, then-ruled by Hafez al-Assad, father of the current dictator, Bashar," said the report's author, Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst and Research Fellow with the society.

"[...] and in the terrorist training camps of the Bekaa Valley [in Lebanon] the PKK was being prepared militarily by the Assad regime, the Soviet Union, and their Palestinian proxies," the report said.

Noting that the PKK launched its war against the Turkish state in 1984 "demanding outright independence," it said the group "established relations with other governments in the region to help sustain its insurgency in Turkey, notably with the revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran and to a lesser degree Saddam Husssein's Iraq".

AA