In an interview given to New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers, Murat Karayilan said “We are not weak,our youths are always ready, hot-blooded and combative, but we want the Kurdish problem — as a nation’s problem, as a people’s problem — to be solved not by guns, but by dialogue.”

Commenting Karayilan's words, the New York Times acknowledged that "now, perhaps more than ever before, there are indications that the war may have reached its endgame."

Karayilan added in the interview that “the Kurdish people are an ancient people in the world,” he said. “All their national and linguistic rights have been denied. Our goal is to achieve those rights.”

And he concluded the interview by urging "the United States, as well as other nations, to stop seeing the conflict through the prism of the “war on terror,” but rather through that of self-determination. “It is the cause of a nation that needs to be addressed,” he said.