SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq — 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.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, announced in May that it would disband and renounce armed conflict, ending four decades of hostilities. The move came after PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned on an island near Istanbul since 1999, urged his group in February to convene a congress and formally disband and disarm.

Öcalan renewed his call in a video message broadcast on Wednesday, saying, “I believe in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons.”

Most journalists weren’t allowed at the site of Friday’s ceremony, in the mounains of Sulaymaniyah province in northern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region. Footage from the event showed fighters — both men and women — casting rifles and machine guns into a large cauldron, where they were then set ablaze.

— The Associated Press