The disarmament process will start under tight security in Iraqi Kurdistan and is expected to take all summer.

Fighters with a Kurdish separatist militant group that has waged a decades-long insurgency in Turkey began laying down their weapons in a symbolic ceremony Friday in northern Iraq, the first concrete step toward a promised disarmament as part of a peace process.

Thirty PKK fighters destroyed their weapons at a ceremony in Iraqi Kurdistan on Friday, two months after the Kurdish rebels ended their decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.The ceremony marks a turning point in the transition of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from armed insurgency to democratic politics,