The Kurdish militant group known as the PKK announced this week that it would end its "work under the name of PKK." The announcement has been hailed as the end of a decades-long armed insurgency, one that has cost an estimated 40,000 lives, between the Turkish state and those fighting for Kurdish rights or independence inside Turkey.

But this week's announcement won't just impact Turkey. The Kurds are an around-40-million-strong ethnic group. If they had their own country, it would be located around the point where the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish borders meet. As an ethnic minority in each of those countries, various Kurdish resistance groups and political parties have also pushed for Kurdish self-determination, some violently, some non-violently. Many have been connected with the PKK, or Kurdish Worker's Party, one way or another.

"Without a doubt, this is a very important announcement," Yusuf Can, an expert on Turkey and former analyst at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank recently shut down by the Trump administration, told DW. "But I think the more important part is what happens next. It's the million-dollar question because the PKK is only one of the organizations within the Kurdish movement in Turkey and beyond Turkey, there are also other components of this movement."

After the 2011 Syrian revolution turned into a brutal civil war, Kurdish groups were able to gain control of northeastern parts of the country, where many Syrian Kurds live. Kurds make up somewhere between 8% and 10% of Syria's population.

Those areas, now known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or DAANES, are controlled by a group known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.

"The SDF has a military force of roughly 100,000 men and women, and its self-declared autonomous administration covers a third of Syria's........

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