Top lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) met for a second time on Wednesday with Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), as the contours of a proposed deal that would end the rebels’ 40-year-long armed campaign against the Turkish state take shape. 

DEM lawmakers Pervin Buldan and Sirri Sureyya Onder spoke with Ocalan for around four hours — double the length of their first meeting with him in December on the prison island where he is being held. DEM said it would be issuing a statement about the talks on Thursday. Sources with close knowledge of the negotiations between the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ocalan, which began in April last year, noted that the broad outlines of a deal that would see Ocalan call on his men to lay down their arms were close to being finalized. In exchange, Turkey would likely end Ocalan’s solitary confinement, free numerous jailed Kurdish politicians, notably the hugely popular Selahattin Demirtas, and shelve its opposition to de facto administrative autonomy for Syria’s Kurds, the sources said. 

Ocalan is expected to make the call either on Feb. 15, which will mark the 26th anniversary of his capture by Turkish special forces in Kenya, or on March 21, the Kurdish Newroz, or New Year, the sources added. 

Ocalan appealed for peace and a new era of strategic partnership between Turks and Kurds in 2013 in a letter that was read out at a massive Newroz rally in the Kurds’ unofficial capital, Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. The call came amid the last round of negotiations between Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which collapsed in 2015. Erdogan’s political ambitions and the refusal of DEM’s predecessor, the HDP, to back them was a key factor in the failure of the last round. The Syrian Kurds’ refusal to take up arms on the side of Turkish-supported Sunni rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was another.