Ankara's talks with Abdullah Ocalan enter perilous phase On a prison island off the coast of Istanbul, sits a man Turkey's government hopes can put the country's troubled Kurdish peace process back on track. He is Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers party (PKK). For generations of Turks his name has been synonymous with terrorism and a conflict that has claimed 40,000 lives over the past three decades. For the past two years Mr Ocalan, in his cell on Imrali island, has been the government's chief hope of ending the bloody dispute because of his status as the head of a Kurdish movement that has long campaigned for greater self-rule. But Ankara's talks with him have entered into perhaps their most perilous and bloodiest phase, scarred by dozens of deaths in street fighting, renewed clashes with the PKK and several unexplained murders of soldiers in the largely Kurdish southeast. On Friday, Bekir Bozdag, Turkey's justice minister, warned that if the violence continued the talks could stop. The turbulence, partly the result of a spillover of tensions from the war in neighbouring Syria, raises questions about the extent of the 66-year-old Mr Ocalan's influence at a time when his comrades in the PKK have signalled a more combative stance, events on the ground appear to have run out of control, and the government's own ability or willingness to compromise is in doubt. "Ocalan above all realises that if he is going to get out of jail, if there is going to be peace in the end, he will have to compromise," says Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group. But if the Kurdish national movement on the street is moving to a more radical phase he is not going to be able to stray too far from that. Mr Ocalan's influence remains immense among many of the Kurds who make up about a fifth of Turkey's 77m population. Last month he demonstrated his clout again when, prompted by the government, he called for and secured the immediate end of violent protests over the fate of the Kurdish Syrian border town of Kobani. Imrali remains the centre of the peace talks, which have yet to evolve into formal negotiations. The talks have followed a tortuous choreography in which Turkey's intelligence agency liaises with Mr Ocalan, who briefs politicians from the country's main pro-Kurdish party, who then travel to the PKK's military redoubt in the mountains of northern Iraq. But Mr Ocalan's pronouncements have seemed increasingly out of sync with events elsewhere. In October he declared the peace process had reached a new stage and that he was "more optimistic," just days after the PKK's military chief had threatened to return to fighting. Since then events have grown more fraught. Just over a week ago, three soldiers in civilian clothes were buying electrical equipment in Yuksekova, a Kurdish town close to the Iraqi and Iranian borders, when masked assailants killed all three with shots to the back of their heads. On Wednesday, a non-commissioned officer shopping with his wife in the Kurdish stronghold of Diyarbakir was murdered in similar circumstances. The murders, which the Turkish military blames on the PKK despite the organisation's denials, undermined one of the peace process's chief selling points: an end to the deaths of young Turkish soldiers. A return to full conflict could produce a public relations and strategic disaster for the PKK, a listed terrorist organisation, at a time when allied Kurdish fighters are winning international recognition for their struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis. On Saturday, Kurdish leaders were careful to avoid violence on a further day of Kobani protests. But Hasan Cemal, a Turkish commentator, is not optimistic that either Mr Ocalan or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, will be able to manage the tensions, arguing that the endgame for the process is still far from clear. "If you continue like this, you will create a kind of vacuum that will be filled by provocations, whether from people in the ranks of the state, or the PKK, or from Turkey's increasing number of regional opponents, such as Syria or Iran," he says. Amid such tensions, both within the state and the PKK, Mr Pope of the International Crisis group urges the Turkish government to embark on broad negotiations with the PKK and the Kurdish diaspora rather than just talking to Mr Ocalan, so as to bring harder line factions into the process. But the recent killings may make such a step far more difficult, only adding to the burden on Mr Ocalan. Additional reporting by Funja Guler