Editing Abdullah Öcalan (section)

==Biography==
Öcalan was born in Ömerli, a village in Halfeti, Şanlıurfa Province in eastern Turkey. While some sources report his birthday as being April 4<sup>th</sup>, 1948, no official birth records for him exist, and he himself claims not to know exactly when he was born, estimating the year to be 1946 or 1947. He is the oldest of seven children. According to some sources, Öcalan's grandmother was an ethnic Turk and (he once claimed that) his mother was also an ethnic Turk. According to Amikam Nachmani, lecturer at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Öcalan did not know Kurdish when he met him in 1991. Nachmani: "''He [Öcalan] told me that he speaks Turkish, gives orders in Turkish, and thinks in Turkish.''"

Öcalan's brother Osman became a PKK commander, serving until defecting with several others to establish the Patriotic and Democratic Party of Kurdistan. His other brother, Mehmet Öcalan, is a member of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).

After graduating from a vocational high school in Ankara (Turkish: ''Ankara Tapu-Kadastro Meslek Lisesi''), Öcalan started working at the Diyarbakir Title Deeds Office. He was relocated one month later to Bakırköy, Istanbul. Later, he entered the Istanbul Law Faculty but transferred after the first year to Ankara University to study political science. His return to Ankara (normally impossible given his situation) was facilitated by the state in order to divide a militant group, Dev-Genç (Revolutionary Youth Federation of Turkey). President Süleyman Demirel later regretted this decision, since the PKK was to become a much greater threat to the state than Dev-Genç.

In 1978, in the midst of the right- and left-wing conflicts which culminated in the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, Öcalan founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which launched a war against the Turkish regime in order to set up an independent Kurdish state. In July 1979 he fled to Syria, where he remained until October 1998, when the Syrian government expelled him.