Duran Kalkan


Duran Kalkan, also known as Selahattin Abbas, is a senior commander of the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
Duran Kalkan, Murat Karayilan and Cemil Bayik, the three current leaders of the PKK, are wanted by the United States Department of the Treasury and the Government of Turkey for recruiting child soldiers, involving in drug trafficking, targeting Turkish government officials, police and security forces, and indiscriminately injuring and killing civilians.

Biography

Kalkan was born in Güzelim, Tufanbeyli, Adana, in 1954 to a family that had migrated from Erzurum.
Initially, serving as a guerrilla commander in the PKK, he succeeded Riza Altun as the PKK's transnational finance manager in the late 1980s and managed the organizations finances in Germany until the early 1990s. After he moved to Iraqi Kurdistan, to evade arrest warrants. There he served as commander in the Arteshen Rizgariya Gelli Kurdistan and member of the PKK's Presidential Council, eventually becoming a member of the Executive Council of the Koma Civakên Kurdistan.
He publishes articles in the Özgür Gündem newspaper under the name Adil Bayram.
In November 2018 the USA declared, that within their Reward for Justice Program they offered a bounty of 3 million US-dollars for informations that lead to the capture of Duran Kalkan.