Leadership-oriented approach in counter-terrorism: Turkey's counterterrorism strategy against the PKK terrorist organization between 2015-2020

This study examines the concept of Organizational Decapitation, which has been developed to support leadership operations defined as decapitation in counter-terrorism literature. Decapitation refers to a strategy aiming to neutralize the top leaders of terrorist organizations possesing a charismatic and cult personality. In line with that strategy, Organizational Decapitation sheds light on a new approach that recommends to target the lower and medium level terrorist leaders with a new, proper and holistic strategy. In order to display the implementation of Organizational Decapitation, Turkey's current counter-terrorism strategy against PKK terrorism has been chosen as the case study of this dissertation. The dataset used in this study is extracted from the platform entitled "Terrorist Wanted List", which has been launched in 2015 under the coordination of Turkish Ministry of Interior. Depending on the information in the Terrorist Wanted List platform, a dataset on Wanted and Neutralized PKK Terrorists Lists has been generated. Findings from the dataset has shown that the majority of neutralized PKK terrorists were lower and middle level terrorist leaders. As a result, the implementation of the Organizational and the initial results of these operations against PKK terrorist organization has been revealed.