The defector also provided Turkish authorities the noms de guerre, hometowns and deployments of more than 100 PKK recruits and officers he’d trained with. They included 74 Kurds from Turkey, 13 from Syria, five from Iran, two from Iraq and a scattering from as far afield as Kyrgyzstan.

PKK recruitment of Syrian Kurds had risen dramatically by late 2011 as that country’s civil war intensified, and they were the largest source of new blood in the PKK, outnumbering Turkish Kurds more than 2-to-1, R.S. said.

R.S. indicated he was unhappy with the apparent cooperation between the PKK, its Syrian affiliate, the People’s Council of Syrian Kurdistan, and the Assad government in Damascus. “The oppression Kurds experienced in Syria for years is clear to see,” he said. “However, the PKK is not carrying out any attacks against the Syrian government in the face of this oppression.” If Syria’s Kurds “stand up to the Bashar Assad regime instead of submitting, the Assad regime cannot survive,” he told his interrogators.

He contrasted the PKK’s view of Assad with its assault on Turkey. In comments that could be seen as self-serving for a newly arrived defector, he said the PKK “ignores the rights accorded to the Kurdish people by the Turkish state and carried out all its attacks against Turkey.”

One of the PKK’s biggest worries, R.S. said, is the unmanned Heron drones that Turkey deploys to spot insurgents, using cameras by day and thermal monitors by night, he said.

On the eve of the offensive, the organization banned the use of radios, to prevent the drones from tracking their movements, and all communications were to be written on notepaper and encoded. Standard issue for fighters included lined umbrellas that enable insurgents “to move freely without being detected by drones and military positions.” The PKK also distributed raincoats, he said.

“Raincoats stop thermal cameras from detecting body heat so long as they are kept dry . . . and at least two inches from the body,” R.S. said. At the first sound of a drone, “we run to shelters. Those who are outside hide motionless under a rock or tree.”

There were other revelations: the PKK since 2006 has maintained an “Immortals Battalion” of about 200 within its special forces whose mission is to carry out “sensational attacks in city centers during critical periods” to create fear and “diminish the citizens’ trust in the state.” Its members are “unwell,” are trained “constantly” in ideology and explosives, and are told they should sacrifice themselves for Kurdistan. “I know they say that when the time comes, they would blow themselves up,” R.S. said.

Like many recruits, R.S. joined the PKK in part to get away from family problems – some analysts say this is the primary reason young men, and women, take to the hills. He signed up in Damascus in the summer of 2010, and after a week of indoctrination, returned to his hometown in northeastern Syria for one night. Along with two couriers, he boarded a raft on the Tigris River and traveled to Iraq.

The first major formation he encountered was a female brigade consisting of 40 to 45 women, but then he was taken to a new recruit training center in the Gare district of Iraqi Kurdistan. After training in three locations for about a year, he was stationed in Sehidan in northern Iran.

R.S. did not say exactly what led him to defect, but it may have been partly personal. During training, he had befriended a young Turkish Kurd, who also had joined in mid-2010, but commanders would not allow them to be deployed together. The two young men had been deployed to Sehidan in May and were on guard duty when they decided to leave.

Fully aware that a major attack was being prepared on the town of Semdinli, they walked for three days and arrived on the outskirts of the town. There, they expected police or soldiers to capture them, “however we encountered no police or soldiers at this time.” So they walked to the headquarters of the military police and surrendered.

Under Turkey’s “law of effective remorse,” defectors who have not committed acts of violence will not be charged with membership in a terrorist organization. If they committed violent acts, the sentence can be reduced by as much as three-quarters. Just what happened to R.S. is not known.