President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said that his government’s "terror-free Türkiye" initiative must not be undermined by political self-interest.
"We will not hesitate to do whatever is necessary to ensure that the process reaches its goal without any setbacks," Erdoğan wrote in an article for daily Sabah published on Jan. 30.
Erdoğan said significant milestones have been passed and that the final report of a parliamentary commission overseeing the project will be completed soon. The National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission is working to synthesize individual party submissions into a unified document.
“As the [ruling] People's Alliance, we have always acted constructively in this process. We have concentrated on the solution and have put not only our hands but our whole bodies into it,” Erdoğan said. “This process, which aims to save our country from a 40-year-old scourge, will not be sacrificed to the self-interest calculations of daily politics.”
The initiative, launched in late 2024, was signaled by Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli’s call for jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan to address parliament. Since then, the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) has maintained communication channels with Öcalan.
The parliamentary panel received a two-month extension to its original 2025 mandate. Commission members have held 20 meetings, hearing from cabinet ministers, legal experts and families of fallen soldiers. The İYİ (Good) Party remains the only major faction to boycott the initiative entirely.
Erdoğan also highlighted progress in Türkiye's defense industry, noting that the localization rate has risen from 20 percent to 80 percent since he took office.
“In 2026, the prototype phase in our defense industry will end, and the mass production and inventory phase will begin. Many of our defense industry projects, including our air defense systems, our national aircraft, our tanks, our drone and armed drone systems, our radar and electronic warfare systems, are progressing successfully,” he wrote.
He praised the ongoing Steel Dome project, launched in August 2024 to integrate Türkiye's domestically produced weapons, radar arrays, and command-and-control units into a single network. The project entered its initial field deployment phase last year.
“We will continue to be present more strongly in the air, on land, at sea, in space, in the cyber homeland, everywhere,” Erdoğan said.
