DIYARBAKIR, Turkey – With Turkey focused on fragile peace talks between Ankara and Kurdish nationalists, another streak of Kurds — loyal not to rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan but to Allah — are silently mounting a bid to establish themselves on the Kurdish political scene. The newcomers are sympathizers of Hezbollah, an outlawed Islamist group unrelated to its Lebanese namesake, which fought the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in a vicious “war within a war” at the peak of the Kurdish conflict in the 1990s. They say they are committed to peaceful politics and want to end the Kurdish fratricide for good. But with no formal peace between Hezbollah and the PKK, mutual mistrust continues to run deep, holding the risk of rekindled tensions when electioneering heats up ahead of local polls next year.

Founded in December, the Free Cause Party — whose acronym “Huda-Par” doubles as “Party of God” — hopes to capitalize on Kurdish allegiance to Islam, which remains strong although the PKK’s three-decade struggle has secularized large segments of Kurdish society. The party leaders, who keep contact with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, position Huda-Par as a third contender for the vote in the mainly Kurdish southeast —  the opposite of the secular Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the PKK’s political extension, and a “more Muslim” alternative for Kurds disenchanted with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Huda-Par Chairman Huseyin Yilmaz and his deputy, Bahattin Temel, who spoke to Al-Monitor in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish city, are cheerful and outspoken men, but do not shake hands with women. They shun the biggest Kurdish annual event, the Nowruz, because it has become “a BDP political show” and “men and women mix there.” Disillusioned with the AKP, they say the “Muslim vote” for the ruling party was meant not as a mandate “to fix the economy” but to lift all restrictions on the Islamic head scarf and even criminalize adultery.

Huda-Par’s Islamist agenda, however, is complete with a strong appeal for Kurdish freedoms and self-rule similar to the demands of the PKK-BDP duo. It comes as a response to BDP’s growing efforts to lure pious Kurds and a message to Ankara that the vision of Islamic fraternity alone is no longer a coin in the Kurdish realm.