ISTANBUL — Turkish lawmakers adopted legislation laying out the dissolution of a Kurdish separatist group and paving the way for one of the world’s longest insurgencies to come to an end.

The law, which parliament passed late Monday, calls for the full disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, commonly known as the PKK, and allows for amnesty to some of its former militants. The group’s armed, four-decade insurrection against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s second-largest army has left tens of thousands of people dead across Turkey, Iraq and Syria, most of them Kurds.

Of the 562 members of parliament present, 468 voted in favor.

Amounting to a de facto peace accord, the historic settlement represents a definitive step by Ankara to build on a ceasefire that began after the PKK agreed to lay down its arms more than a year ago.

If successful, the settlement could bolster Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s credentials ahead of the next presidential elections — currently scheduled for 2028 — as the leader who resolved the bloody conflict, which has cost Turkey an estimated $2 trillion. It would also free the government to channel more political and economic energy into stabilizing the Middle East, including by helping rebuild war-torn Syria, in line with the U.S.’s vision and its own strategic goals.

It was not immediately clear whether the legislation would grant PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan release from the island in the Marmara Sea on which he’s been imprisoned since 1999. Ocalan approves of the law, Turkey’s main Kurdish political party said in a statement earlier this month.

Some opposition parties heavily resist peace with the PKK and have called the legislation an affront to Turkish soldiers who were killed in the conflict. They argue that the potentially thousands of PKK militants who had fled the country and would now be allowed to return could stoke social unrest.

Erdogan’s AK Party and its parliamentary allies may have been trying to communicate unity by formalizing a peace on the symbolic date of Aug. 10. The Treaty of Sevres, passed on the same day in 1920 though never ratified, dissolved the Ottoman Empire after World War I, divided its remaining lands among European powers and laid the groundwork for a Kurdish state.

The initial goal of the PKK, which took up arms in 1984, was the creation of an independent Kurdish state. But over the years it shifted its aims toward legal recognition and greater constitutional rights for Kurds, who make up about a fifth of the country’s population of 86 million and are concentrated in southeast Anatolia. Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union classify the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Significant Kurdish populations also exist in Syria, Iraq and Iran. U.S. support for Kurdish forces in Syria, which include PKK affiliates, was for years a persistent tension point between Turkey and the U.S. Both have since backed Damascus’s efforts to fold those forces into a centralized Syrian military.

Turkey and the PKK last neared a peace agreement in early 2015. Talks collapsed after a surge in support for Kurdish parties helped strip Erdogan’s AK Party of its parliamentary majority in a general election that year.

A resulting clampdown on Kurdish officials included the arrest of Selahattin Demirtas, the then leader of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey, over alleged links to the PKK. Demirtas has been in prison since 2016.

Erdogan began reviving peace talks with the Kurds early last year after Devlet Bahceli, an ultranationalist ally of the president, said Ocalan should be released from prison if he urged the PKK to disband.

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