The nation of Turkey had always been rent by conflict, though those conflicts were not often open. By the time the twenty-first century began, those conflicts were slowly but surely coming to the fore. They began as national conflicts, when in 2006 the Kurdish minority in the east stepped up their long-dormant campaign for national autonomy. These campaigns were attacked with violent repression by the central government in Ankara, but these attacks only served to align more and more Kurds on the side of the autonomists. By 2008, the conflict had grown military, with the government and the Workers Party of Kurdistan exchanging blows in both Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan.