The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is an armed militant group founded in the 1970s and led, until his capture in 1999, by Abdullah Öcalan. The PKK's ideology was founded on revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and Kurdish nationalism. The PKK's goal has been to create an independent socialist Kurdish state in a territory which it claims as "Kurdistan", an area that encompasses parts of south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Iraq, north-eastern Syria and north-western Iran. It is an ethnic separatist organization that uses force and the threat of force against both civilian and military targets for the purpose of achieving its political goal.